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Katharine Elizabeth Dopp 



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THE PLACE OF INDUSTRIES 
IN ELEMENTARY EDUCATION 



Vhe Place oflnduflrkj 
in €>lem entity Sducdtion 



By Katharine Elizabeth Dopp 



Chicago: T>he Uoiveyify of Chicago Pry? 
London: P. S. King and Son :: mdcccciii 



THE LIBRARY 0F 
CONGRESS, 

Two Copies Received 

APR 16 1903 

Copyright Entry 

CLASS Ol- XXo. No 

COPY S. ' 



^u 



Copyright 1Q02 

BY THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO 
CHICAGO 



CONTENTS. 
CHAPTER I. 

PAGK 

Introduction i 

CHAPTER II. 
Significance of Industrial Epochs - - - 14 

1. The House Industries, or the Period of 
Domestic Economy 14 

a. The Hunting Stage - - - - - 16 

b. The Fishing Stage 31 

c. The Pastoral Stage 35 

d. The Agricultural Stage - - - - 40 

e. The Age of Metals 44 

/. Travel, Trade, and Transportation - - 48 

g. The City-State 51 

h. The Feudal System - - - - 53 

2. The Handicraft System, or the Period of 
Town Economy - - - - - - 54 

3. The Factory System, or the Period of National 
Economy 56 

CHAPTER III. 
Origins of Attitudes that Underlie Industry 60 

CHAPTER IV. 
Practical Applications ----- 97 

1. Guiding Principles - - - - - 97 

2. Stage of Infancy - - - - - - 104 

3. Transitional Stage from Infancy to Childhood 121 

4. Stage of Childhood 155 

CHAPTER V. 

Conclusion 173 

Index - . - igi 



AUTHOR'S NOTE. 

The difficulties that beset the way of those 
interested in elementary education are many. 
They have called forth much discussion during 
the past decade, and already a great advance has 
been made, If this book contributes to the gen- 
eral movement it will doubtless be due to the 
fact that it suggests ways of bringing into vital 
relations forces and materials which, hitherto, 
have remained almost untouched. 

The study here made is based upon several 
years' practical experience, during which many 
tentative efforts were made along lines marked 
out in this book, as well as upon research work 
in the Departments of Education and Sociology 
in the University of Chicago. To the men and 
women of these departments, from whom I have 
received much in the way of guidance and inspira- 
tion, I am greatly indebted. They all, I am 
sure, will recognize in the discussion of the stages 
of mental development the influence of Profes- 
sor Dewey; and in the interpretation of primitive 
activities, that of Professor W. I. Thomas. 

The University of Chicago, 
March, 1902. 



CHAPTER I. 
INTRODUCTION. 

One of the most striking characteristics of 
society today is the marvelous development that 
is everywhere manifest along industrial lines. In 
nearly every department of industry the simple 
processes which formerly prevailed have become 
differentiated into a great variety of activities, 
and all have been organized into a definite sys- 
tem. Methods of exploiting the earth in the 
search for raw materials, processes of manufac- 
ture, and modes of distribution and exchange 
have become wonderfully complex. The influence 
of this change is far-reaching. It permeates 
every department of life. It operates in the 
church as well as in the state, in the home as well 
as in the school. No institution of society can 
escape its influence. 

Society today differs from earlier societies, not 
in its organic character, by virtue of which the 
life of one institution affects that of every other ; 
it differs, rather, in the complexity of its organi- 
zation, which frequently obscures the more fun- 
damental relations which, in primitive societies, 
are laid bare to the view. 

From the remotest to the most recent times, 
i 



2 THE PLACE OF INDUSTRIES 

in the simplest as well as in the most highly or- 
ganized societies, industry has been a dominant 
force in the upbuilding and maintaining of social 
structures. In the more simple social groups it 
is possible to perceive very clearly the fundamen- 
tal place of industry in society and the vitality of 
its relation to all other activities in life. In such 
societies it appears as the matrix that holds 
within itself the other interests of life, which it 
nourishes until they become strong enough to 
support themselves. The vitality of this relation 
is illustrated in more developed societies in the 
decadence of those arts whose connection with 
the parent stock has been severed, as well as in 
the remarkable development of the same arts dur- 
ing the times when they have stood in such rela- 
tions to the industrial life of the people as to be 
constantly receiving and giving strong currents 
of inspiration. 

Human beings of all times have doubtless been 
impelled by other desires than thosewhich under- 
lie industrial activities ; they have always been 
dimly conscious of unfulfilled desires. The fact 
that industry has ever exercised such a promi- 
nent place in conditioning other activities is not 
because others, at times, have not been valued 
more highly, but because industry is the sub- 
structure of society, which conditions its very 
existence. It was necessary to the maintenance 



IN ELEMENTARY ED UCA TION 3 

of life before individuals had united to form 
social groups. It was an essential factor in the 
formation and maintenance of such groups, and 
has been a permanent factor throughout the ages 
in the development of the institutions of com- 
munity life. 

It seems evident, then, that that which is the 
condition of life itself and the fountain source of 
the arts and institutions of society should have 
a place in the education of the young, upon whom 
will soon fall the responsibility of maintaining 
and advancing the activities by which society is 
sustained and strengthened. This need has always 
been felt, and provision of some kind has always 
been made for putting young people in posses- 
sion of such experience as is calculated to fit 
them for the serious work of life. The character 
of this training has varied with the people and 
the age, but in some form or other it has per- 
sisted throughout all time. 

Among Aryan peoples, from the earliest time to 
the latter part of the Middle Ages, this training 
was generally attended to by the family, whether 
it was the original clan, the patriarchal group, the 
tribal circle, or the family artificially extended by 
personal servitude. During the period of town 
economy, which extended from the rise of the 
towns and the development of handicrafts in the 
latter part of the Middle Ages until the industrial 



4 THE PLACE OF INDUSTRIES 

revolution of the eighteenth century, the train- 
ing of the family was supplemented and in some 
cases superseded by the system of apprenticeship. 
With the rise of national economy ', technical insti- 
tutions and engineering and commercial courses 
were established in order to meet the demand for 
trained workers to manage the various depart- 
ments of highly complex industrial undertakings. 
No provision, however, was made for the training 
of the great mass of the workers for their life- 
work. This was partly due, no doubt, to the fact 
that the new inventions made it possible to utilize 
unskilled labor to a degree not known before that 
time. 

The rapid development of means for cheap 
manufacture and transportation has resulted, as is 
well known, in the withdrawal of the industries 
formerly carried on in the home and the trans- 
planting of the same into factories where the work 
is carried on with closed doors. The child of 
today is thus deprived, except in a few cases, of 
the opportunity to observe or to participate in 
the industrial processes that form the substratum 
of all of our social achievements. If the conse- 
quences of this situation were felt only in the out- 
put of our industrial institutions, the consideration 
of this subject might well be left in the hands of 
the captains of industry and the economists. If, 
however, the consequences are such as to affect 



IN ELEMENTARY ED UCA TION 5 

the quality of life itself, the subject is surely one 
that cannot safely be neglected by those inter- 
ested in the cause of education. 

It is because it is believed that the industrial 
training of the young holds in solution the essen- 
tial ideas that underlie the various activities of 
society, and that this substratum of experience 
in industrial processes is as necessary a condition 
for the normal development of the individual as 
racial industry has been for the maintenance and 
advance of society itself, that the question is 
beginning to command the attention of thought- 
ful people. 

Under the conditions of modern life we can no 
longer expect the home to furnish the child with 
experience in industrial processes ; we must look 
to some other institution. The institution that 
we look to most naturally is the school ; but the 
common-school curriculum is already over- 
crowded, and, if new subjects are to be added by 
the process of aggregation, all interested in the 
work must object to any such change. Happily, 
however, in respect to the subject under consid- 
eration, industrial training, it is not so much a 
question of imposing greater burdens from with- 
out as it is of finding the means of reconciliation 
between the child and the subjects already there. 
The mere fact that every one recognizes the child 
as being burdened with his school work is signifi- 



6 THE PLACE OF INDUSTRIES 

cant. While it must not be expected that indus- 
try will of itself exercise a magic touch by means 
of which all the burdens of the school will be trans- 
formed, it is not too much to expect that it will 
exercise a potent influence, if introduced into the 
schools in an organic way, satisfying at the same 
time the demands of the child and of society. The 
difficulty in elementary education has not been in 
the child nor in the demands made by society; 
it has been in the failure to make use of that by 
means of which the two may be brought into 
vital relationship. 

This work is an attempt to make clear that 
there is a closer relation than is usually recog- 
nized between the attitudes of the child and the 
serious activities of society in all ages. It is an 
attempt to bring together from the domain of 
education, on the one hand, and of anthropology, 
sociology, and history, on the other, ideas that 
will mutually reinforce each other. The territory 
is so vast, and the state of knowledge in the de- 
partments concerned is as yet in such an empirical 
state, that the value of a work of this kind con- 
sists rather in its power of suggesting new ways 
of dealing with old problems than in offering 
definite solutions to them. It is more important 
at this stage of the subject to get a general sur- 
vey of the field than it is to work out in detail 
a small portion, without regard to its relations 



IN ELEMENTAR Y ED UCA TION 7 

to a larger whole. The scope of this work for- 
bids a minute examination of any one phase. 
The subject is treated in some of its more general 
aspects, and illustrations are introduced, particu- 
larly with reference to those phases to which 
little attention has yet been given. 

In order to secure a basis for the work it has 
seemed best to consider, on the one hand, the 
several stages of industrial development in the 
race with reference to the educational significance 
of each, and, on the other, the successive periods 
in the development of the child. In the consid- 
eration of an industrial epoch an attempt is made 
to discover (i) some of the more important inter- 
actions that take place between man and his nat- 
ural and social environment, (2) how these result 
in different forms of industry, and (3) how forms 
of industry influence the social organization of 
the people and the development of the sciences 
and arts. The attempt is also made to show 
that there is more than an accidental relation 
between the technique represented in the tool, 
and the intellectual, moral, and social condition 
of the people. Attention is given to those racial 
activities which, through physical heredity, have 
been potent in determining the psychical attitudes 
of the child, as well as to those which have sur- 
vived as ideas, customs, and habits of thought, 
and which operate, through social heredity, in 



8 THE PLACE OF INDUSTRIES 

shaping our attitudes toward industry of various 
forms. 

In the light of these facts regarding racial devel- 
opment and what is known of the successive stages 
in the life of the child, some of the more important 
critical periods in racial and in industrial develop- 
ment will be noted, and a deeper significance of 
each sought by reference to the other, as well as to 
the natural and social environment in which each 
is set. The attempt is made to separate the 
transient from the permanent factors in the suc- 
cessive stages of an activity, and to make use of 
the permanent factors in such a way as to secure 
a principle of selection and a guiding principle 
which will be of service in determining the con- 
ditions of education in the successive stages of 
child life. 

In the selection of materials upon which to 
base this discussion, it may seem that the activi- 
ties of primitive life have received an undue share 
of attention. But if it is taken into consideration 
that civilization is only as yesterday when viewed 
with reference to the long period of human de- 
velopment ; that the deep-seated, permanent, 
and abiding impulses are the result of racial 
experiences before man had emerged from the 
savage stage; and that later racial activities influ- 
ence psychical attitudes in a much less permanent 
and effective way, this method will, from the 



IN ELEMENTAR Y ED UCA TION g 

point of view of one who would interpret the 
child's interests and attitudes, perhaps be justified. 
It is hoped, moreover, that it will be shown to be 
justified from the point of view of the course of 
study. 

The consideration of primitive life, then, will 
have a twofold purpose, (i) with reference to 
its significance in interpreting the attitudes of the 
child, and (2) with reference to what it has to 
yield, especially along social and technological 
lines, for the course of study. Only by laying 
hold of both our physical and social heredity can 
we be fully equipped for furthering the work of 
education. 

Typical selections of materials from later stages 
of culture will be used to illustrate the character 
of work in the higher grades. To organize and 
adapt such material to purposes of elementary 
education is the work of years and requires 
co-operative effort. In this place little more can 
be done than to determine the principles of selec- 
tion and to illustrate one method of applica- 
tion. 

Advance in almost every line of culture con- 
sists in a more economical use of forces already 
applied, or in the harnessing of new forces to a 
work already begun. The educational process 
has been such as to involve a great amount of 
waste. The strongest forces available in the 



10 THE PLACE OF INDUSTRIES 

work of education have been almost untouched. 
In a few cases the relation of the child's psy- 
chical attitudes to their origin and to organized 
social life have been recognized sufficiently to 
arouse a demand in the educational world for 
literature dealing with the successive stages of 
racial development ; but only rarely has it been 
recognized that, however valuable such work 
may be as one factor in the solution of the prob- 
lem, and however much the child may enjoy 
such stories, to stop at this point is to throw 
away the kernel and be satisfied with the husk. 
Such an application substitutes stories about- activi- 
ties for the activities themselves ; it is an undue 
emphasis upon the more passive, the receptive 
powers of human nature, and a neglect of the 
more active, the expressive ones ; it is a stim- 
ulation of the imagination without a provision 
for a corresponding motor manifestation. How 
to make use of the emotional attitudes of the 
child that are usually allowed to discharge 
themselves without further educational signi- 
ficance than that they afford physical develop- 
ment and keep alive the emotions normal to 
children and necessary to vigorous growth ; how 
to direct them in such a way as to afford the 
child, in each stage of his development, an 
experience suited to his capacity in the funda- 
mental processes by which society in all ages 



IN ELEMENTARY ED UCA TION 1 1 

sustains itself; how to transform the dramatic 
and play instincts of the child into the real inter- 
ests of adult life without diminution in their 
vigor and purity — these are most vital problems 
in education. 

Such problems will, doubtless, be solved in 
many ways in future times, for it cannot be sup- 
posed that any solution of a practical question 
will satisfy even all the people of any one period. 
The solution that is offered at this time is based 
upon the fact that the child, in the successive 
stages of his development, always has important 
problems of his own, which, if worked out, en- 
larged, and interpreted in the light of similar ex- 
periences of the race, represent a process which 
is a genuine reconciliation of the individual and 
society. 

The child's problem arises in a present diffi- 
culty that he realizes with reference to his own 
natural or social environment. The enriching ma- 
terial, the subject-matter, may be selected from 
the racial experiences of any age. That which de- 
termines its fitness for the purpose is not the age 
from which it is chosen, but the psychical attitude 
to which it corresponds, the difficulty of the 
technique involved, the complexity of organiza- 
tion which it represents. Under such conditions 
the past is no longer isolated from the present in 
the mind of the child. It is an organic part of 



1 2 THE PLA CE OF IND USTRIES 

society as it is today. It is a fundamental factor 
in the educational process. 

The history of industrial activities represents a 
fundamental factor in the education of the child, 
because it furnishes a series of typical problems 
that correspond to the changes in his own atti- 
tudes. Because the past still lives in the present, 
because its problems are simpler statements of 
the most fundamental problems of the present, 
the history of the industrial activities of the past 
is especially valuable as subject-matter in ele- 
mentary education. That it is used no more than 
it is at present is due to the fact that no one has 
yet given sufficient attention to the subject to 
organize it with reference to present educational 
needs. 

Nowhere is it more evident that a thorough 
examination of one line of culture leads one into 
the whole of life than in such an investigation as 
this. At each step one is brought face to face 
with problems which were not previously thought 
to be a part of the subject under investigation. It 
has not seemed wise to thrust these altogether 
to one side, for by so doing the purpose of the 
investigation would be, in a measure, defeated. 
There is some reason to believe that if, at times, 
what was considered a minor matter assumes 
a greater prominence, it is a factor that de- 
serves attention. It is just because industry 



IN ELEMENTAR Y ED UCA TION 1 3 

holds so many factors bound up in it that it is of 
such consequence in education. How these vari- 
ous factors become free, how they become strong 
enough to set up ends on their own account, how 
society is affected by these changes — all these 
questions promise rich suggestions with reference 
to present problems. 

Such an examination as will bring to view the 
necessary conditions for the development of 
industries cannot ignore the vital relations that 
they sustain to the sciences and the arts. They 
are organic parts of the subject and should be rec- 
ognized as such. If, in many places, relations of 
this character are passed by with little notice or 
even ignored, it is due to the limitations to 
which one is subject in dealing with a problem 
of so wide a scope, and not to the failure to rec- 
ognize that they represent essential factors in the 
development of the subject. 



CHAPTER II. 

SIGNIFICANCE OF INDUSTRIAL EPOCHS. 

The industrial activities of the race have been 
classified by economists into three main divisions. 
The earliest and by far the most prolonged period 
is that of domestic economy, or the period of 
house industries, which lasted from the earliest 
times until the rise of the towns in the tenth cen- 
tury. The second is the period of town economy, 
or the period of the handicrafts, lasting from the 
tenth century until the beginning of modern 
times. The third is the period of natio?ial econ- 
omy, or the age of machinery and the factory in 
which we are living. 

THE HOUSE INDUSTRIES, OR THE PERIOD OF 
DOMESTIC ECONOMY. 

The house industries are especially significant 
with reference to elementary education. They 
represent the experience of the race in industrial 
activities, whether private or public, through the 
long ages which preceded the handicraft period. 
They are important as factors in the shaping of 
the early forms of our institutions, and give a 
significance to much that would be meaningless 
apart from such a relation. They represent the 
activities which were instrumental in the forma- 

14 



IN ELEMENTARY ED UCA TION 1 5 

tion of our physical co-ordinations and psychical 
attitudes. In relation to the early years of devel- 
opment they are much more important than the 
industrial activities of later periods, because they 
correspond more closely to the psychical attitudes 
of the child than do the activities of later periods. 
The activities of later epochs are not without 
their influence in shaping the attitudes of the 
child, but they operate more through social than 
through physical heredity. 

No classification of the stages of domestic 
industry has yet been made that is not open to 
some objection. The activities of human life are 
not subject to a rigid classification. The more 
characteristic features of racial activities may, 
however, be organized under such terms as the 
hunting, fishing, pastoral, and agricultural stages, 
the age of metals, trade and transportation, the 
city-state, and the feudal system. Such terms 
serve the purpose of organizing activities which 
represent an increasing development of mind 
and a corresponding complexity in social struc- 
ture. 

In order to discover what place industry has 
had in these successive stages of racial develop- 
ment it may be well to consider the successive 
situations in which man found himself, the na- 
ture of his equipment, and the ways in which he 
dealt with the problems at hand. 



1 6 THE PL A CE OF IND US TRIES 

THE HUNTING STAGE. 

From what the researches of the palaeontologist, 
the geologist, and the anthropologist have revealed 
we are able to reconstruct in outline some of the 
more characteristic features of the life of man in 
western Europe during the mid-Pleistocene period. 

Man found himself in a dangerous situation. 
The cave-bear, the cave-lion, the sabre-toothed 
felis (Machairodus latidens), the big-nosed, the 
small-nosed, and the woolly rhinoceros, the 
hippopotamus, and the mammoth were a con- 
stant source of terror. Packs of hyenas, wolves, 
panthers, and wild-cats were always near, ready 
to pounce upon their prey ; and even the urus, 
the aurochs, the wild boar, and the wild horse, 
though usually peaceable, were formidable antag- 
onists when aroused. 

It is quite certain that all these beasts were 
not present at the same season, for some of them 
are tropical, while others are arctic species. Mr. 
Boyd Dawkins, who has given careful attention 
to these problems, believes that during the early 
part of the mid-Pleistocene period the different 
species migrated with the seasons. 

The climate of this early period was character- 
ized by less extreme temperature in summer 
and in winter than at present, and it was very 
damp. Toward the close of the mid-Pleistocene 
period it became much colder. 



IN ELEMENTAR Y ED UCA TION 1 7 

The chief forms of plant life were evergreen 
trees, of which the spruce, the fir, and the yew 
tree were most abundant. Trees which shed their 
foliage were represented by the oak and the 
birch. The rivers were bright in places with yel- 
low and white water-lilies, and their banks were 
shaded by laurels. A thick undergrowth of the 
sloe, the original form of the wild plum tree, 
formed thorny thickets which were places of 
refuge for the animals that were in need of pro- 
tection. The marshes offered a heavy growth of 
grass, and were partly covered with alders, os- 
mund royal, and marsh trefoil. Hornworts and 
weeds grew in the pools. Wild peas and beans, 
stringy-rooted carrots, rutabagas, and turnips 
grew in the open spaces on the hillsides. The 
cabbage, with its thick leaves, was found, but it 
had not yet developed a hard head. Wild flax 
and a variety of wild grasses covered the tree- 
less plains and the open spaces of the upland 
regions. Such was the environment of the ear- 
liest people in western Europe of which we have 
any record. What was man's equipment at this 
time ? How was he fitted to live in such a diffi- 
cult situation ? 

The change from organic to human evolution 
was a gradual one. Such animal instincts as 
could lend themselves to social service survived. 
Advance from this point consisted, not in devel- 



1 8 THE PLA CE OF IND USTRIES 

oping new or better bodily organs, but in con- 
trolling them and in supplementing and mul- 
tiplying their power by the use of external 
means. 

Various scientists and artists have combined 
their efforts at different times to make restora- 
tions of the skeletons found in or near the caves 
of France. Huxley gives the following descrip- 
tion of them : x " The anatomical characters of the 
skeletons bear out conclusions which are not flat- 
tering to the appearance of the owners. They are 
short of stature, but powerfully built, with strong, 
curiously curved thigh bones, the lower ends of 
which are so fastened that they must have walked 
with a bend at the knees. Their long, depressed 
skulls had very strong brow ridges ; their lower 
jaws, of brutal depth and solidity, sloped away 
from the teeth downward and backward, in con- 
sequence of the absence of that specially char- 
acteristic feature of the higher type of man, the 
chin prominence." 

Mr. Boaz is authority for the statement that 
the savage had as great brain capacity as civil- 
ized man and that his mental processes were very 
similar. 2 In the early part of the mid-Pleisto- 

*For further information on this line see Worthington 
Smith, Man the Primeval Savage, Chap. I, and H. N. Hutch- 
inson, Prehistoric Man and Beast. 

2 Franz Boaz, "The Mind of Primitive Man," Journal of 
American Folk- Lore, Vol. XIV, p. I. 



IN ELEMENTAR Y ED UCA TION 1 9 

cene period man must have needed his hands 
for purposes of locomotion, for until he had con- 
quered fire and learned to manufacture and use 
weapons the trees offered him the safest retreat 
from his numerous enemies. Man of this period 
had hands, but they were not yet free for the 
service of the mind ; he was destitute of all 
means of shelter except those supplied by 
nature; he had no assurance of a regular food 
supply; he was without clothing, without imple- 
ments of labor, and the weapons of offense and 
defense. 

Compared with any one of the animals man 
was outranked in some respect. He could not 
run as fast as the horse, swim as well as the fish, 
fly as the eagle, crawl as the serpent, or ren- 
der himself inconspicuous by changing his color 
to correspond with the natural objects with which 
he habitually came in contact, or by maintaining 
such a control of his muscles as the wild calf 
and other animals do when they remain motion- 
less in order to be unobserved. He was not pro- 
tected with armor as the turtle is, with a thick 
skin as the rhinoceros, with a heavy coat as 
the mammoth, or with feathers and fur as the 
birds and beasts of prey. In his conflicts he 
could not strike as the cave-bear, kick as the 
horse, crush as the rhinoceros, gore as the urus, 
or pierce and rend as the tiger. In the exer- 



20 THE PLACE OF INDUSTRIES 

cise of the senses and in muscular force he was 
surpassed by many of them. 

In what then did man's superiority consist? 
How was he able to exercise control over such 
an environment? His advantage seems to have 
consisted in this: he had developed associative 
memory to a degree surpassing that of any 
creature; and, although physically he was sur- 
passed in some respect by every species of ani- 
mal, 1 he united in one body the variety of move- 
ments and methods of resistance used by every 
species of animal. The special superiority of 
each animal had been gained by surrendering the 
possibility to advance along other lines. Ani- 
mals have paid a dear price for their special 
skill. The hope of the future seems to lie in the 
undifferentiated form. This appears to be true 
of both animal and human life. 

Associative memory by means of which man 
is able to inhibit instinctive action and so se- 
cure an advantage that a former experience has 
shown to be desirable, and an erect body with 
free hands by means of which he can perform 
a variety of activities, are the points of lever- 
age by means of which man has lifted himself 
above other forms of animal life. 

The body is thus a storehouse of the principles 

x O. T. Mason, "Primitive Travel and Transportation," 
Smithsonian Report of the United States National Museum, 1894, 
P. 257- 



IN ELEMENTARY ED UCA TION 2 1 

of invention ;* it furnishes the motive power, and 
contains the pattern of the various types of tools 
and several mechanical principles and simple 
machines; it has furnished the original standards 
of all modes of measurement; it is the predom- 
inant factor in rhythm, which is the germ of the 
fine arts; it has furnished the activities which 
form the root words of our language, and the 
meter of our poetry; and its activities are the 
basis of all possible expressions of emotional 
life. 

The early history of human activity is an 
account of how man, by means of associative 
memory and the powers of his body, succeeded 
in establishing relations with his environment. 
Whether man originally was a social or solitary 
creature is not settled beyond dispute. That all 

x Ibid, 1894, p. 252: "Jeremiah Head, in speaking of the mechani- 
cal principles of invention actually existing in the body of man and 
referring to some involving the carrying art, says that the human 
foot contains instances of the first and second, and the forearm of 
the third order of lever. The patella is a part of a pulley; there 
are hinges and ball-and-socket joints with lubricating arrange- 
ments; lungs are bellows, and the heart is a combination of 
force pumps; the wrist, ankle and spinal vertebrae form univer- 
sal joints; the nerves form a complete telegraph system with up 
and down lines and a central exchange; the circulation of blood 
is a double line of canals, in which the liquid and the boats 
move together, making the circuit twice a minute, distributing 
supplies wherever required, and taking up return loads without 
stopping; it is also a heat-distributing apparatus, establishing a 
general average, as engineers endeavor to do in building." 



22 THE PLACE OF INDUSTRIES 

other interests were dominated for a considerable 
time by the need of the individual for food and 
protection there is little question. That for a 
considerable period man lived chiefly upon veg- 
etable food and such forms of animal food as he 
could obtain without weapons is undoubtedly 
true. The instinct of self-preservation compelled 
him to seek to escape conflict with the beasts of 
prey. In the exploitation of his environment in 
search of food it was necessary for him to be alert 
in recognizing sights and sounds. Noise meant 
danger, and he who did not respond to this 
instinctively was liable to lose his life. Reflec- 
tion, under such circumstances, was too expensive 
a form of specialization to be indulged in. Fear 
at this time was a virtue necessary to the pre- 
servation of life. 

Previous to the use of fire, owing to the burden 
placed upon the hands in locomotion, upon the 
teeth and digestive apparatus in grinding, crush- 
ing, and digesting uncooked food, and on 
account of the expenditure of energy in main- 
taining the necessary temperature of the body 
without the aid of clothing and fire, man had 
little surplus energy upon which to draw for 
satisfying other needs than those directly rela- 
ted to gathering food and escaping from the 
attacks of wild animals. Yet even in this age he 
began the work of supplementing the power of 



IN ELEMENT AR Y ED UCA TION 2 3 

his body by means of the simplest implements 
and weapons. 

In this earliest period of which we have records 
man established destructive relations with plants 
and the smaller animals. He sought to avoid con- 
flict with the larger animals ; yet he could not 
help being curious about them, for curiosity was 
a necessary quality in such an environment as 
the one in which he lived. The curiosity, the 
fear, and the wonder with which he regarded 
these creatures undoubtedly were serviceable in 
the conquest of fire which was first regarded as 
a wild beast. The significance of this conquest 
is inestimable, and it is not strange that people 
worshipped the fire, for many ages, and that, in 
later times, the unknown hero who made the con- 
quest was thought of as a god. The change in 
industrial and social life wrought by this con- 
quest ought, even in present times, to place the 
conqueror high in the ranks of industrial heroes. 

Sympathetic relations with fire once estab- 
lished, social life is assured. The protection thus 
afforded from the attacks of wild beasts was suf- 
ficient to relieve man of a great strain as well as 
to free his hands for a higher service. Under 
such conditions it was possible to accumulate a 
greater surplus of nervous energy than before, 
which could be drawn upon for various purposes. 
Although in many respects the individual still 



24 THE PLACE OF INDUSTRIES 

supplied his own needs, the use of fire involved 
the beginning of the division of labor and 
co-operative action. The women naturally cared 
for the children and stayed near the fire. Be- 
cause they were not free to travel far from the 
fireplace, they gathered such plant foods as were 
available and attended to the household duties. 
The men were free to engage in a more vigorous 
and strenuous life. The presence of a common 
enemy aroused common action, which required 
more thought than individual action and was by 
no means achieved without many tentative efforts. 
The successful conflict with wild beasts was 
apt to exhaust the stored-up nervous energy, but 
it provided food and hence leisure for some time. 
Abundance of food and leisure resulted in the 
accumulation of new stores of energy, which 
were bound to find expression. Such animals as 
the dog and the cat can remain in a passive con- 
dition for long periods, but with the human be- 
ing it is impossible. The stored-up energy must 
find expression. It is in such periods as these 
that we find activities similar in kind to those per- 
formed at other times, but different in their end. 
Free from the conditions imposed by the real hunt, 
the savage plays he is hunting and we have the 
beginning of the dance. In the real hunt men 
are united by a common need and participate in 
a common emotional reaction; in the dramatic 



IN ELEMENTAR Y ED UCA TION 2 5 

representation of the hunt they are aroused by a 
common feeling and purpose, and spontaneously 
respond to the same. The rhythmic response of 
the individual receives stimulus from that of his 
fellows, and, through suggestion, becomes modi- 
fied until each one surrenders himself to the com- 
mon feeling through which the individuality of 
each becomes fused in that of the group. 

At other times man may expend his surplus 
energy in the search for bright and shining ob- 
jects, which he may pierce and string, and we 
have the beginning of dress and decoration ; or 
he may trace in the sand, or on the walls of 
his cave, or on the bones of animals he has 
slain, mere lines at haphazard, until by a happy 
co-ordination he produces a semblance to some 
familiar form, and we have the beginning of 
drawing. It would be easy to multiply instances 
of this kind; but these are- sufficient to illus- 
trate the fact that the beginnings of art depend 
upon leisure and an accumulation of energy, and 
that the art instinct, which is bound up at first with 
the workmanship instinct, becomes free only as 
less strenuous conditions of life afford room for 
its manifestation. The pleasure afforded on ac- 
count of the intellectual perception of likeness 
and the emotional feeling of power stimulate to 
further activity as opportunity is afforded, and 
the action passes from the domain of the acci- 



26 THE PLACE OF INDUSTRIES 

dental and becomes more and more subservient 
to the dominant desires of the individual. 

The fact that hunting peoples surpass pastoral 
and agricultural peoples in representative art is 
largely due to the fact that among hunting tribes 
every man is obliged to hunt and to provide him- 
self with weapons. In the hunting stage every one 
had to be a good rmnter and a good handworker 
or die. The co-ordinations made use of in his crafts 
supplied the necessary skill for the early drafts- 
man and carver ; the intimate acquaintance with 
animals made necessary by his mode of life de- 
veloped a sympathetic interest in animal forms ; 
hence it is not strange that the drawings and 
carvings of the cavemen of the late Pleistocene 
period have never been surpassed among nature 
peoples. Neither is it surprising that the arts 
which require considerable leisure were not culti- 
vated. 

Social life reacted upon industrial activities 
in various ways. Even in cases where the in- 
dividual supplied his own needs the mere pres- 
ence of his associates was sufficient to give a 
richer meaning to his own work. It no longer 
meant the mere satisfaction of physical needs. 
The need of social approval was felt, and efforts 
to exhibit self so as to gain that approval were 
aroused. The greatest social need of the age 
was for courage, daring, muscular strength, sup- 



IN ELEMENTARY ED UCA TION 2 7 

pleness, alertness, endurance, and power to secure 
co-operative action. He who could prove that he 
possessed such traits found favor with his people. 
It is this fact that makes the trophy of a success- 
ful encounter significant. This, too, may ac- 
count for the method of showing superiority by 
means of boasting, or by taunting the enemy, or 
of attracting attention by means of scarification 
or ornament. Anything that could secure fa- 
vorable attention to himself from members of his 
group, and particularly from those of the oppo- 
site sex, was quickly appropriated. 

Any one who has taken the pains to study the 
subject of primitive decoration knows that in 
many cases the ornaments must have cost many 
days of what we should call tedious, persistent 
effort. What was it that sustained the savage in 
such activities as these ? It was the sustaining 
power of an idea. The savage had an ideal 
which he was striving to realize. He was creat- 
ing something. He was not engaged in pro- 
ducing something foreign to himself, but that 
which was considered as much a part of him as 
one of the organs of his body. He was increasing 
his own power, he was enhancing his personality. 
This was what sustained him as he worked. This 
was what stimulated him to renewed effort in 
carrying to completion a work which, deprived of 
these personal and social associations, would have 



28 THE PLACE OF INDUSTRIES 

been intolerable. The self-exhibitive instinct 
thus appears to have been one of the most 
potent forces in the training of man to persistent, 
intellectual control of his powers through the use 
of his hands. 

As man increased his power by refraining from 
purely instinctive action and by making use of 
his experiences in devising more and more 
indirect modes of reaction ; as he came more 
under the influence of social forces, he began to 
dominate his environment to such an extent that 
the minds of the animals were affected by it. 
Man's cunning thus developed animal cunning. 
It is probable that this change took place in 
the grass-eating animals as early as the begin- 
ning of the late Pleistocene period. At this 
time the arctic mammalia took possession of 
the land and occupied it in company with those 
forms that characterized the preceding age, with 
the exception of the Machairodus latidens and the 
big-nosed rhinoceros, both of which had become 
extinct, and those living species that migrated at 
this time on account of the intense cold. There 
was thus a change in the situation brought about 
by the intense cold, the absence of so great a 
supply of vegetable food, the presence of new 
animal forms, the extinction or migration of 
others, and the change, in the habits of those that 
remained, due to the cunning of man. 



IN ELEMENTAR Y ED UCA TION 29 

The increasing complexity in the situation 
made it necessary for man to find new resources 
within himself by means of which he could cope 
with the new and difficult problems. There was 
greater need of craft, foresight, endurance, and 
the speed that can result only from careful atten- 
tion to means of preserving the suppleness of the 
limbs. 1 And man responded to the demands 
of the age. Each new difficulty was removed 
or lessened by the invention of traps, the 
improvement of weapons and other devices by 
means of which the warfare upon animals could 
be maintained ; the earth was rendered more 
habitable by the removal of the more formidable 
antagonists ; man learned to carry on more com- 
plicated co-operative activities made necessary 
by the complexity of the situation ; and he 
made use of his leisure time in developing the 
industries and arts. Such forward steps consti- 
tute the history of the intellectual advance that 
man made at this time. They reveal the path by 
which man learned to modify his instinctive reac- 
tions by the use of associative memory under the 
impulse of the social needs of the age in which 
he lived. Physical needs alone could have been 
satisfied without so great an effort. It was the 

1 Professor W. I. Thomas has called attention to the signifi- 
cance of this fact in relation to the division of labor between the 
sexes, in an article entitled "Sexes in Primitive Industry," pub- 
lished in the American Journal of Sociology, Vol. IV, p. 474. 



30 THE PLACE OF INDUSTRIES 

social needs which stimulated man to his bravest 
deeds as well as to those quiet, tedious activities 
necessary in order to manufacture the weapons, 
implements, and ornaments without which it was 
impossible to gain the approval of his group. 

A superficial examination of the activities of 
the age may seem to warrant the conclusion that 
it was an age characterized by the destructive 
spirit. A deeper study reveals the fact that in 
its outcome, at least, it was constructive. Viewed 
with reference to the social need of the age 
destruction was more significant than construc- 
tion ; but then, as now, destruction and construc- 
tion were but the two phases of one activity. 

Although man of the hunting stage had not 
reduced his knowledge to intellectual formulas, 
he had made considerable progress in the 
sciences and the arts. He had gained this 
knowledge under the impulse of his heed of 
food, protection, shelter, and clothing. He was 
familiar with the habits of all the wild animals of 
his locality, and with most of the useful and 
poisonous plants. He was familiar with the 
topography of the various regions in which he 
lived and with the special advantages afforded 
by each. He knew the signs of the weather and 
the relation of the changing position of some of 
the heavenly bodies to coming changes in his 
own activities. He had learned the limitations 



IN ELEMENTARY ED UCA TION 3 l 

and the possibilities of the raw materials with 
which he worked, how to select the best materials 
for his weapons, implements, and utensils, and 
how to manufacture and manipulate the same. 
He had learned how to submit himself to a leader 
in time of danger and how to take the lead. He 
had learned how to live in sympathetic relations 
with members of his own clan and how to gain 
the social approval of the members of his group. 

THE FISHING STAGE. 

The earliest fishing peoples of whom we have 
any records are those whose history has been 
preserved in the kitchen-middens or shell 
mounds, which are still found along the coasts 
of the Atlantic as well as along the lower courses 
of many rivers tributary to that ocean. These 
people are usually placed in the epoch immedi- 
ately following the Pleistocene period, and they 
represent the earliest people of the age fre- 
quently characterized as the Polished Sto?ie Age. 

The climate had become more like what it is 
today. All the larger forms of animal life which 
had characterized the preceding age were now 
extinct with the exception of the Irish deer, 
which was becoming rare. The arctic mam- 
malia had withdrawn to the north, and the forms 
which have existed either wild or in a state of 
domestication from that time till within com- 
paratively recent times prevailed. 



32 THE PLACE OF INDUSTRIES 

The situation at this time was less dangerous 
than during the Pleistocene period, owing to the 
destruction of the more formidable of the wild 
animals and the enlistment in man's cause of the 
dog, which was domesticated during this period. 
The problems of the hunter of this period were 
similar in kind to those of the Eskimo before the 
introduction of improved implements. In fowl- 
ing and fishing man had new problems to solve. 
In hunting the conflict was with the animals that 
lived only on the land, but in fowling and fish- 
ing man had to deal with animals that inhabited 
elements inaccessible to him. How man learned 
to lengthen his arms by means of poles, sub- 
stitute pieces of bone or hard wood in place 
of fingers, rude rakes for hands, dip-nets in 
place of the scoop made with the two hands, 
hooks in place of the bent fingers, fish-weirs and 
stones in place of natural means of enclosing fish 
in a shallow place ; how he learned to wall in 
with stones large flats, and so pen in the fish 
brought in by the tides ; how he made fish-weirs 
in the shallow waters — these are some of the 
problems that man dealt with in the simplest 
stages of life by the sea. 

Even after man learned to hunt the animals on 
the land and catch the fish in the water he was 
unable to capture the birds that lived on the sea. 
They presented to him a complex problem, for 



IN ELEMENTARY EDUCA TION 33 

they could walk or run on the land, fly in the air, 
and swim in the water. Buffon, the great naturalist, 
wrote that if the wild duck had not been obliged 
to come to the land in nesting time it probably 
would have escaped from man, if not altogether, 
yet for a much longer time than it did. Man 
early learned to take advantage of the young 
ducks of the marshes before they had learned to 
fly; he learned to swim below the surface of the 
water, breathing through a hollow reed while he 
grasped and drew one after another of the unsus- 
pecting fowls beneath the water; he learned to 
out-wit them with smoke, baits, and traps, and, 
later, after he had domesticated some of them, 
with their own kind. In so doing he grappled 
with problems that made demands for less force 
but more foresight, more cunning than had been 
necessary before. 

The shoals of deep-sea fish that came to the 
shores or up the rivers in the spawning season 
and later disappeared, tempted man to follow. 
The desire to find access to these stores of food 
supply added its weight to curiosity already 
reaching out to comprehend the mysteries of the 
winds, the waves, and the changing character of 
the ever-present sea. 

An account of the ways in which man utilized 
his own body, and the suggestions of his en- 
vironment in selecting and manufacturing devices 



3 4 THE PLA CE OF IND US TRIES 

by means of which he made himself master of the 
sea and the fowls of the air, is a chapter not only 
in the history of industry but in the acquisition 
of human freedom. 

In general the activities of this period may be 
characterized as less dominated by physical force, 
and affording a larger place for the play of the 
mind in more subtle fields. The life of the hunter 
was spasmodic, irregular : that of the fisher- 
man was more regular, more continuous, more 
characterized by co-operative action. So im- 
portant was the dance as a means of securing 
union of effort, so close was the relation between 
the co-ordinated movements there represented 
and those in the actual operation, that the per- 
son who was so careless as to make a mistake in 
the dance met with the severest disapproval of 
his group. Few of the activities of the fisher- 
man could be carried out successfully without 
co-operative action. Co-operation in deep-sea 
expeditions was impossible without careful or- 
ganization, which was made possible only through 
the unifying power of rhythm. The man who 
could feel the situation in advance, and who 
could represent it in the form of a dance, was 
the industrial chief, who led in the adventurous 
undertakings on the deep sea. 

Relations once established with the inhabitants 
of the land, the sea, and the air, a more steady 



IN ELEMENT AR Y ED UCA TION 3 5 

supply of food was possible than before; a greater 
surplus of energy was available. This was largely 
utilized in the manufacture of fishing tackle of 
various kinds, boats, rafts, basketry, pottery, and 
in the invention of different forms of the dance, 
which had not yet set free poetry and song, and 
which had not itself become free from the con- 
trolling power of industrial activities. 

Just as the hunter read into the natural features 
of his environment the meaning of his own activi- 
ties and gave us the germs of our hunting myths, 
so the fisherman interpreted the natural life about 
him in the light of his own experience, and gave 
to the world the beginnings of sea-lore. The 
subtlety of the elements with which he had to 
deal was not without its influence in determining 
the character of his thought and feeling. The 
ever-present yet ever-changing sea and sky were 
real lessons in the philosophy of life. 

THE PASTORAL STAGE. 

The transition from the hunting and fishing 
stages to the pastoral stage is a gradual one. The 
situation differs with local conditions, but there 
are always permanent factors operating to induce 
man to make the change. The hunting life 
becomes more and more strenuous as the wild 
animals develop more and more cunning under 
the influence of man's presence. Even though 
man in the Pleistocene period succeeded in rid- 



36 THE PLACE OF INDUSTRIES 

ding the earth of the most terrible of his antago- 
nists, beasts of prey still survive and prey upon 
the more gentle grass-eating animals, and even 
make attacks upon man himself. The grass- 
eating animals, which form the food supply of 
these creatures as well as the larger part of the 
food of man, become more alert, more skilful in 
eluding their enemies ; but in spite of this their 
numbers become reduced. The natural increase 
in population, together with that caused by 
invading tribes, tends to reduce the number of 
animals to such a degree that it is no longer 
possible for a given area to support the life of 
the beasts of prey and the human inhabitants, 
who depend upon hunting as their chief means 
of subsistence. 

Parallel to the changes already noted there 
take place changes which represent more and 
more complex methods of hunting. Traps by 
means of which animals may be deceived and 
captured alive are invented. Frequently, no 
doubt, young animals are caught in traps and 
taken home for pets for the little ones. These, 
which remain in the care of the women and 
children for the most part, are found useful as 
food in times of scarcity. The advantage of the 
presence of animals in a semi-domesticated or 
domesticated state is perceived and remembered. 
That which took place by an accident or for the 



IN ELEMENTARY ED UCA TION 3 7 

sake of pleasure, finally becomes a serious busi- 
ness. 

Man finds that by establishing sympathetic 
relations with the grass-eating animals he can live 
on a smaller area than by hunting them. These 
relations, however, bring him face to face with a 
whole range of new problems which require more 
forethought and regularity than were necessary 
before. When man lived as a hunter or a fisher 
the animals that furnished his food cared for 
themselves. He merely found ways of capturing 
them as he needed a supply. Now he has a 
whole range of duties, which bring little return 
for some time. The end of his action is more 
distant. It is no wonder that many tribes, dis- 
couraged in their efforts to find good pastures 
and water for their flocks, and in futile attempts 
to protect them from wild animals, hostile tribes, 
and the winter's cold, revert to their previous 
mode of life. But it is equally apparent that the 
tribe that meets these difficulties successfully, that 
increases in wealth by the rapid increase of flocks 
and herds, as well as by the spoils of war, will 
become attached to this mode of life — a life that 
offers sufficient play for the conflict interest to 
afford satisfactory emotional reactions, and that 
affords, for the first time, a regular supply of 
nourishing food and a great deal of leisure time. 

It is not accidental that art flourished in the 



38 THE PLACE OF INDUSTRIES 

pastoral period. Music and musical instruments, 
which were used for purposes of signals and for 
regulating rhythmical movements of the hunting 
and fishing dances, now made a rapid advance ; 
and, although they did not become entirely free 
from the industrial activities of the times, they 
were not so distinctly subservient to utilitarian 
needs as before. It was during this period that 
the story-teller, the dancer, and the singer 
emerged from the mass in response to the need 
of a more adequate means of securing satisfac- 
tory emotional reactions. 

It was at this time that the arts of spinning, 
weaving, dyeing and the subsidiary activities con- 
nected with the textile art were developed. The 
skill acquired in the hunting and fishing stages 
with sinews and various forms of woody fibers, 
when applied to wool and flax resulted in greatly 
improved methods of clothing, in a higher degree 
of skill, and in a development of art forms in 
which music, poetry, and the dance were still 
intimately associated. 

Much of the surplus energy afforded by the 
easy life of the developed pastoral stage was 
expended in warfare. The accumulation of 
property offered a sufficient material inducement, 
but this was subordinate to the pressing needs of 
a strong, emotional reaction which the ordinary 
duties in the tranquil life of the shepherd did not 



IN ELEMENTARY EDUCA TION 39 

afford. In so far as the destructive spirit of 
warfare prevailed, it interfered with the develop- 
ment of broad sympathies, which are necessary to 
the highest manifestation of art ; but it fulfilled 
a social service in so far as it secured a necessary 
means of recreation, and organized society into 
larger and larger political groups. It was 
through war that society became organized, that 
political institutions were established. Even 
though these institutions never attained stability 
in the pastoral stage, the framework was laid, so 
that later tribes could utilize the results achieved 
in the upbuilding of more permanent and better 
organized societies. 

Perhaps the most valuable contribution that 
this stage of culture has made to the world is its 
humanizing element. This was developed partly 
by the need of sympathetic relations with the. 
domestic animals, and partly by the spirit of 
reverence and veneration that was fostered by 
the patriarchal family, which was formed in 
response to the centralizing tendency of the 
activities of the pastoral life. The young hunter 
depended largely upon his own efforts and could 
easily withdraw himself from his group, for a 
time at least. The shepherd boy was bound to 
his flocks. He had no means of support outside 
of the family ruled by a patriarch. 

Industrial dependence undoubtedly was a 



40 THE PLACE OF INDUSTRIES 

potent factor in developing a sense of social 
dependence. Both fostered a peaceful life within 
the group. Even though the pastoral peoples 
were undoubtedly hostile to strangers, their 
mode of life developed sympathetic relations 
within the group. The kindness of old age found 
its counterpart in the gentleness that it fos- 
tered in the care of the young. The establish- 
ment of these sympathetic relations at home and 
hostile ones abroad secured in social and political 
life a co-operative action and an organization of 
effort, which could not have been secured by the 
industrial activities alone. 

THE AGRICULTURAL STAGE. 

While still in the hunting stage considerable 
progress had been made in agriculture by women. 
The irregular life of the time, however, seriously 
interfered with its development, and often the 
crop had to be left before it was ripe for the 
harvest. Although developed agriculture is found 
in the fertile lowlands it was not in such places 
that it originated. It is probable that the 
hunters on the wooded hills, on account of the 
pressure of the population, depended more and 
more upon the exertion of the women to eke out 
an existence, and that the terrace gardens whose 
remains are still found on many hillsides repre- 
sent the first organized attempt to maintain soci- 
ety by the cultivation of plants. 



IN ELEMENTAR Y ED UCA TION 4 1 

In many cases the domestication of animals by 
the men and the cultivation of plants by the women 
developed side by side. But unless the men of 
the tribe were strong enough to protect their ani- 
mals from the raids of the strongest shepherds, 
they were obliged sooner or later to take upon 
themselves the work of the women. By bringing 
to woman's work the superior technological skill 
developed in the contests with wild animals during 
the hunting stage, and by being able to specialize 
to an extent that woman has never been able to 
do, man was able to get far greater results from 
the cultivation of the soil than had been possible 
under conditions that had prevailed previous to 
this time. Agriculture was no longer one of the 
many occupations of woman ; it had become the 
principal occupation of man. 

Where conditions were such as to secure the 
necessary protection, the agricultural life was of 
great educational value to the race. Protection 
was often gained by establishing settlements 
upon islands, naturally fortified peninsulas, barri- 
caded marshes and, finally, resort was had to pile- 
dwellings erected upon the lakes. It is significant 
that fortification appeared with the settled agri- 
cultural life. Agriculture required much thought 
and severe bodily exertion. The products of 
such labor were too precious to be left unpro- 
tected. The hunter, the fisherman, or the shep- 



4 2 THE PLA CE OF IND US TRIES 

herd, if driven from one site, could find many 
others equally satisfactory ; but the farmer, who 
put his thought and his labor into the soil, 
valued it too highly to yield it without a 
struggle. Because the shepherd's life cost him 
so little bodily exertion, because he could in- 
crease his property so rapidly, he esteemed it 
lightly ; but it was very different with the man 
who tilled the soil. He not only expended mus- 
cular force but he busied himself in discovering 
nature's secrets. He had to learn how to prepare 
the soil in the best way with the crude tools at 
his disposal ; he had to learn the best time to 
sow the seed and what seeds would grow rapidly 
enough to mature before the early frosts ; he had 
to invent ways in which to protect the growing 
crop from birds and beasts and from the thought- 
less members of his own clan, who were with 
difficulty prevented from consuming the crop be- 
fore it was ready for the harvest. He had also to 
invent tools and to learn how to utilize animals 
as a motive power in work ; he had to invent 
harnesses, evolve carts, measure time, and regu- 
late consumption as well as production. 

The conditions which man had to take into 
consideration in agriculture were more complex 
than in any other mode of life yet attempted. 
Plants, unlike animals, cannot be depended upon 
to reproduce and preserve themselves. They 



IN ELEMENT AR Y ED UCA TION 4 3 

are subject to constantly varying dangers. There 
is need of constant observation of the phenomena 
of climate, unceasing prevision, and unremitting 
toil in order to deal successfully with the series 
of difficulties that beset the way from seedtime 
to harvest. The agricultural life thus made ex- 
treme demands upon both mind and body and 
afforded little opportunity for a satisfactory 
emotional reaction. The stimulus was so slight, 
the problem so vague, the end so distant, the 
conflict interest so reduced, that there was diffi- 
culty in maintaining interest sufficient to secure 
a successful outcome. For this reason it was 
necessary to reinforce the stimulus by artificial 
means. This is the significance of the festivals 
which accompanied every important step in the 
season's work. This is why religion was sum- 
moned to lend its support in securing the neces- 
sary regulation of activities of this difficult mode 
of life. 

The advantages of agriculture as a means of 
furnishing an abundant supply of food from a 
small area soon became apparent. Man's labor 
acquired a value hitherto unknown. Captives 
in war were now too valuable to be put to death. 
They were enslaved and compelled to carry on 
agriculture under the supervision of their con- 
querors. 

On the wide prairies the shepherds could 



44 THE PLACE OF INDUSTRIES 

live for a long time, but as they came nearer 
the forests and banks of the lakes and streams 
it was necessary to take up the plow; but land 
once under the plow does not turn back into 
pasture land. The advances of the pastoral peo- 
ple were sudden and rapid, and their losses were 
the same. The advances of the agricultural 
people were gradual but permanent. In the 
conflict agriculture was bound to win in the end. 
The predatory instinct, which was developed 
by the warlike pastoral peoples who would not 
submit to a life of labor was, then as now, turned 
to social ends. In those days it united people 
and produced a feeling for political order and 
subordination to which the settled life of agricul- 
ture served to give stability. In these later 
times it survives in the organizer of great indus- 
trial and commercial enterprises, and in the lead- 
ers of great scientific explorations and discoveries. 

THE AGE OF METALS. 

During the earlier stages of culture man fre- 
quently made use of such metals as he could find 
in the pure state for ornaments ; and it not infre- 
quently happened, in localities rich in native cop- 
per, that it was made use of for implements and 
weapons. But this process involved little of the 
insight and skill of the real work in metallurgy. 
How man first discovered the secret treasures of 



IN ELEMENT A R Y ED UCA TION 4 5 

the earth, how he harnessed the wind and fire to 
do his bidding, will probably ever remain one of 
the unwritten chapters of history. Yet, it is pos- 
sible, within certain limits, to reconstruct the situ- 
ation and to determine the problems with which 
man had to deal, as well as the experience which 
he could bring to bear upon the same. 

Hunting tribes had long been familiar with the 
use of fire in shaping weapons, and had learned 
the effect of heat upon the various stones upon 
which they worked. This experience and that 
gained in firing pottery, especially such as con- 
tained bits of shells, united with experience in 
the use of blowguns, formed a substructure upon 
which itwas possible to build theart of metallurgy. 

Whether the first experience in reducing ores 
came about through the presence of such ore in 
the camp-fire, or whether it was the result of 
some great conflagration in a region abounding 
in ore, is not a matter of any great consequence. 
The significant fact is that the result of the acci- 
dent was noted, and that the effort was made to 
produce consciously a product similar to that 
which was the result of an accident. The name of 
the genius who made the discovery is not known. 
The stories that people who have passed through 
this stage tell of him indicate his superiority, the 
significance of his work, and his place in the 
society in which he lived. 



46 THE PLACE OF INDUSTRIES 

Tradition points to the fact that the art of 
metal-working was founded by a warrior disabled 
in battle, who, no longer able to engage in the 
more strenuous conflict of war, turned his ener- 
gies in another direction. It is very probable 
that such a man, chafing under his physical weak- 
ness and eager to avail himself of any opportunity 
to make good his lost strength, would be quicker 
to recognize the significance of an accidental 
process of smelting ore than one whose ener- 
gies found expression in a more active life. The 
problem, presented under these circumstances 
to a man accustomed to lead, would not be given 
up without a thorough testing of all available 
means. The difficulty of the various steps in 
the process, as well as the significance of the 
application of the new material in the manufac- 
ture of implements and weapons, would unite in 
causing the founder of this art to guard the pro- 
cess from the public. It cost too much labor, 
too much thought, to be lightly parted with. 
Besides, it was a means of support under con- 
ditions in which it was impossible to engage in 
other occupations. 

Perhaps it was the secrecy which surrounded 
the art, as well as the almost magical character 
of the new implements, that caused strange 
stories to be told of the early smiths and metal 
workers. It surely was for the interest of the 



IN ELEMENTARY EDUCA TION 47 

worker who would protect his art to encourage 
the belief in his supernatural character. The 
prevalence of such superstitions accounts for the 
fact that when any one not initiated into the mys- 
teries of the process wished some product of the 
metal worker's craft, he would approach to a 
spot some rods away from the workshop and 
there hang in a conspicuous place a leaf, the 
shape of the weapon or implement desired, 
together with a quarter of meat or some other 
useful object. The fact that a weapon of the 
desired shape was found the next morning on the 
spot was accounted for by the magical power of 
the mysterious man who dwelt in the obscure 
place, secluded from the gaze of men. 

The significance of the use of metals is incal- 
culable. The fact that the process was so diffi- 
cult and so much more indirect than most 
industrial processes of the time made it necessary 
for the people who practiced this art to devote a 
considerable part of their time to this work 
alone. When the advantage of the use of metal 
in place of stone was once perceived, a demand 
sufficient to enable the workers to devote their 
whole time to the art was made. This greatly 
influenced the development of trade, which from 
this time becomes a more regular feature of life. 
The use of metals affected agriculture so as to al- 
most revolutionize its methods of work. It was 



4 8 THE PL A CE OF IND US TRIES 

no less powerful in its influence on warfare, both 
offensive and defensive, thus indirectly affecting 
the location and character of habitations. So 
powerfully has it influenced the mechanical arts 
that it is not uncommon to read that they origi- 
nated in the art of metallurgy. This statement 
is too extreme, for it ignores the humble efforts 
of countless workers of the long ages that pre- 
ceded this discovery, but it serves to emphasize 
the fact that this art has put into man's hands 
tools, without which he could never have grap- 
pled with the difficulties he has been able to over- 
come by their use. 

TRAVEL, TRADE, AND TRANSPORTATION. 

Man has ever been a wanderer. The original 
stimulus to travel was found in the search for 
food. If man would gain the fruits of the plant 
world he had to travel to the favored places in 
the proper season. Animals came to him, but 
they also migrated again, and he followed them, 
utilizing the trails that they made. The birds in 
their flight suggested that there might be better 
places beyond ; and even the movements of clouds 
and the heavenly bodies were not without their 
influence. Man's route was the trail of wild ani- 
mals, his guides their familiar forms, the stars, 
currents of wind and water, and his own instincts 
and experiences. As societies became established 



IN ELEMENTAR Y ED UCA TION 49 

man traveled to attend tribal gatherings. These, 
although they partook largely of a religious or 
festive character, actually served to promote trade, 
which for a long time consisted of the exchange 
of presents. 

The increase in population, which tended more 
and more to confine people to more restricted 
territories, and the specialization of tribal indus- 
tries due to the difference in the distribution of 
the raw materials of production, tended to foster 
a more regular exchange. In some cases this 
took place in the form of tribal visits to the 
favored spots on the payment of tribute ; in other 
cases temporary markets and fairs were estab- 
lished on neutral territory, or at places that 
marked a break in transportation. The advan- 
tage of this exchange was such as to make it 
desirable for all to foster it ; and so in many 
places regular markets were allowed, even in hos- 
tile territory ; and traders, travelers, and carriers 
were allowed to pass through an enemy's country 
unmolested. 

The need of standards of measurement gave 
the mind more precise problems with which to 
deal, and artificial standards were gradually devel- 
oped to take the place of the natural units that 
were subject to too great a variation to satisfy the 
sense of justice that was being developed by 
trade. The possibility of acquiring the special 



5 THE PLA CE OF IND US TRIES 

productions of other tribes through trade oper- 
ated to increase the desires of man. He was no 
longer satisfied with the necessities of life and 
such ornaments as he could manufacture by util- 
izing the resources of his own environment. He 
began to demand the luxuries of life, and for a 
long time trade with remote regions consisted 
chiefly in an exchange of such articles. But it 
was as true then as now that the luxuries of one 
age are the necessities of the next ; and so it was 
brought about that the demand for exchange be- 
came more sure and steady, and people occupied 
themselves with improving its technique. 

Whether the trade was by sea or by land, it 
was necessary to consider routes of travel and 
ways of improving the same ; it was necessary 
to consider the motive power, the vehicle, the 
devices for attaching the burden ; it was neces- 
sary to consider means of caring for the comfort 
of the carriers, and a multitude of problems origi- 
nating in the various activities concerned in the 
process of taking the goods from the producer 
to the consumer. 

The activities that cluster about primitive trade, 
travel, and transportation were significant not only 
with reference to the development of man's intel- 
lect, but with reference to his emotional nature. 
The satisfaction of human desires now made it 
necessary to establish sympathetic relations with 



IN ELEMENTARY ED UCA TION 5 l 

people related by no recognized bonds of fellow- 
ship. The contact with strange people at fairs, 
at the market places, or by means of nomadic 
trade, broadened the ideas and widened the sym- 
pathies. The influence of travel and trade in all 
time has been to establish and maintain peaceful 
relations except when it has been necessary to 
exploit new fields ; but even this temporary atti- 
tude of hostility is, from the point of view of the 
trader, a necessary step in establishing wider rela- 
tions of a peaceful and industrial character. 

But while the development of trade tends to 
unite peoples, for a time, at least, it separates 
individuals. 1 Hospitality gives way to a sense of 
exact justice which makes the rendering of the 
most trifling things which humanity would de- 
mand a subject of trade. 

The growth of commerce develops a new type 
of man. Each day brings a multitude of prob- 
lems which must be dispatched with the least 
possible delay. The similarity of the problems 
that arise day after day, appearing under particu- 
lar differences, develops the habit of deciding 
questions with directness and dispatch. It secures 
the habit of ready adaptation within certain pre- 
scribed limits. 

THE CITY-STATE. 

The succeeding epochs in the period of house 

1 Montesquieu, The Spirit of Laws, Vol. I, p. 365. 



5 2 THE PLA CE OF IND US TRIES 

industries differ from those already outlined 
chiefly in degree. The city-state is merely an 
expression for that stage of culture in which man 
in eastern Europe, western Asia, and northern 
Africa made the conquest of the river-valleys, 
which previously had defied his efforts to bring 
them under cultivation because of the inadequacy 
of his implements and the limitations of his politi- 
cal institutions. The history of the development 
of the city-state is an account of the growth of a 
more and more prosperous tribal town or nomadic 
village which gradually subjugates the less pow- 
erful neighboring peoples. It is the history of 
the transition of these peoples from barbarism 
to civilization. 

The city-state introduced a new principle of 
rank, and with this a division of operative func- 
tions. In its earliest development it failed to 
recognize the necessity of a "general homogene- 
ity and interdependence of parts and that unifi- 
cation which gives solidarity." It simply sought 
to compel the outlying subject cities to acknowl- 
edge allegiance and to pay tribute. "Gradu- 
ally," writes Mr. Powell, 1 " the lesson was learned 
that universal empire can be but transient with- 
out the universal adoption of the institutions and 
religions and even the languages of the conquer- 

1 J. W. Powell, " From Barbarism to Civilization," American 
Anthropologist, Vol. I, p. no. 



IN ELEMENTARY EDUCA TION 53 

ors Then it was that a new class of 

nations developed — nations organized for the col- 
lection of tribute and the establishment of solidar- 
ity Sometimes the center was on the 

Nile, sometimes on the Euphrates, sometimes on 
the shores of the Mediterranean — and at last con- 
querors dreamed of being masters of the world." 

THE FEUDAL SYSTEM. 

What the city-state was to the tribal towns 
and nomadic villages of the East, feudalism was 
to those of the West. With the pressure of new 
populations there arose the need of defending 
and rendering more habitable the lands already 
possessed. There was constant danger of attacks 
from barbarian tribes on every hand. The cen- 
tral governments were too weak to render effec- 
tive service in the absence of ready means of 
intercommunication, and the isolated village 
communities were too weak to act alone. There 
was need of more concerted action. The small 
land owners were in need of protection, and the 
large ones in need of working and fighting men. 
There were few places of defense and little or 
no money available for rents and wages. Under 
these circumstances willing hands erected the 
great feudal castles to which all might flee in 
time of danger, and gladly rendered personal 
service in return for protection. 



54 THE PLACE OF INDUSTRIES 

The feudal castle with encircling villages be- 
neath its walls represented an enlarged family, and 
was regulated in much the same way as the patri- 
archal family of earlier days. Under this regime 
such skill in special lines was developed that 
when the time came for emancipation, the work- 
ers were ready to take up the free work which 
characterizes the handicraft period. Feudal in- 
dustries thus, in a special sense, represent the 
transition from domestic or house industries to 
the handicraft system, which characterized the 
period of town economy. 

THE HANDICRAFT SYSTEM, OR THE PERIOD OF 
TOWN ECONOMY. 

The handicraft system of labor arose in west- 
ern Europe with the use of money, the freeing 
of the slaves and serfs, the development of com- 
merce, and the rise of the free towns. Services 
which had been rendered by slaves were now 
performed by free men. People who no longer 
had slaves still had the need of service, and under 
the new conditions they employed the various 
handicraftsmen to do the work which was paid 
for in money. "The handicraftsman," writes 
Professor Bucher, " is distinguished from the 
wage-worker only in the fact that he possesses 
all the means of production, and sells for a defi- 
nite price the finished article which is the 
product of his own raw material and his own 



IN ELEMENTAR Y ED UCA TION 5 5 

incorporated labor, while the wage-worker merely 
receives a recompense for his labor." 1 The fact 
that the handicraftsman always worked for the 
consumer served to place responsibility for the 
quality of the work. 

This period is characterized by a marked 
differentiation of the activities of producing the 
raw material from those of manufacturing it into 
the required form. It is true that these activi- 
ties had previously been performed by different 
people, but the different activities had been 
under the direction of one man who controlled 
the entire process. Under this regime there was 
a continual narrowing of the activity belonging 
to any one craft, and there grew up with the 
development of the craft-guilds a spirit of " in- 
ternal bickerings." 

During the period of house industries the labor 
of the individual was significant in relation to the 
family or clan. Under the system of handicraft 
labor it was significant in relation to the local 
market of the community in which the handicrafts- 
man resided. Modes of travel and transportation 
were such that in respect to the necessaries of life 
each community had to be self-sufficing. When, 
upon the application of other than human power 
to industrial processes, handicraft labor was forced 
to give way to the factory, and the local market 

x Carl Bucher, Industrial Evolution, p- 170. 



5 6 THE PLA CE OF IND US TRIES 

to the national or international market, it became 
restricted to a narrower sphere. In that sphere it 
still performs a distinct social service. " That 
sphere," writes Professor Bucher, " today is the 
country, the districts where it still finds the con- 
ditions of existence that gave birth to it in the 
Middle Ages." 1 

During this period there was a remarkable 
application of wind and water power to indus- 
trial processes formerly carried on by human or 
animal power. This fact, together with the many 
inventions which were expressions of ways of 
utilizing these new forces, is significant when 
considered with reference to the inauguration of 
free labor. 

THE FACTORY SYSTEM, OR THE PERIOD OF 
NATIONAL ECONOMY. 

The factory system arose in response to the 
use of steam as a motive power. Before steam 
could be utilized as a motive power it was neces- 
sary to invent means of applying it to a given 
work. At this point science came to the aid of 
industry and contributed the knowledge by 
means of which steam could be applied and con- 
trolled. 

The history of the application of steam to 
means of travel and transportation is the record 

1 Industrial Evolution, p. 211. 



IN ELEMENTARY ED UCA TION 5 7 

of the change from exploiting the immediate 
locality in the interests of industry to that of 
exploiting the remotest regions of the known 
world. It is a record of the change from the 
sale of goods at a local market to the sale of 
them in the great markets of the world. The 
history of the application of steam to the manu- 
facturing process is the history of the change 
from the simple handicraft labor with simple 
tools in the interests of the immediate locality, 
to the centralized system, which represents the 
organization of the entire process of production 
for a national market in the most effective way 
yet known. 

While it is a serious question whether the 
economy gained through the minute division of 
labor which separates the skilled from the un- 
skilled, the mechanical from the intellectual, is 
not at the expense of the workers themselves, it 
cannot be denied that all classes have received 
benefits from the introduction of the factory 
system. The complexity of the social life which 
has resulted from the use of steam as a motive 
power has presented problems that baffle the 
powers of the most acute. Whether they will 
be settled in this stage or whether they will give 
way to a new set of problems that will come 
with the application of a new power is a question 
for the future. 



5 8 THE PLA CE OF IND US TRIES 

The use of electricity or some other power 
that can easily be transported would certainly 
operate to check the centralizing tendency 
brought about by the use of the steam engine. 
There is little doubt that science will again come 
to the aid of mankind and afford a solution to 
many of the vexed social questions by means of 
promoting the advance of industrial methods. 

11 The unwillingness to use machinery," writes 
Mr. Burges, "may perhaps be traced to the 
teaching of Mr. Ruskin and of the late Mr. 
Pugin, but then these gentlemen have unfortu- 
nately been misunderstood. What they have 
battled for was the disuse of mechanical means 
in the production of architectural ornaments. 
Thus, in a building, they objected to cast leaves 
in a cornice because one would be exactly like 
another and because the undercuttings could not 
be obtained from a mould; but, as far as I can 
see, they never objected to the proper employ- 
ment of machinery as a help to either the artist 
or the workman. In fact, Pugin says in one of 
his works that had he 'a cathedral to build, one 
of the first things he would do would be to set 
up a lathe to turn the smaller columns.'" 1 

A careful study of the various forms of in- 
dustry that prevail in our own age in various parts 
of the world, together with the consideration 

1 Burges, Art Applied to Industry. 



IN ELEMENTAR Y ED UCA TION 5 9 

of such thoughts as Mr. Mitchell presents in his 
book entitled The Past in the Present, leads one to 
appreciate the closing words of one of the chap- 
ters in Professor Bucher's Industrial Evolution 
where he writes, " For after all, the comforting 
result of every serious consideration of history 
is, that no single element of culture which has 
once entered into the life of men is lost, that 
even after the hour of its predominance has ex- 
pired, it continues in some more modest posi- 
tion to co-operate in the realization of the great 
end in which we all believe, the helping of man- 
kind toward more and more perfect forms of ex- 
istence." 1 

1 Carl Bucher, Industrial Evolution, p. 184. 



CHAPTER III. 

ORIGINS OF THE ATTITUDES THAT UNDERLIE 
INDUSTRY. 

" If we could obtain an ultimate analysis of 
what is at work in the world about us, shaping 
the minds and the destinies of mankind, we 
would doubtless find there the deeds of all the 
vanished units of the race, each having a share, 
great or small, in the human activity of the 
present moment." 1 The truth which this state- 
ment of Professor Shaler's expresses compels 
one who would understand the attitudes of the 
child to take into account their origin; for, how- 
ever closely we focus our attention to the facts 
of the present, much of their significance escapes 
if they are not illumined by the light derived 
from a study of the past activities of the race in 
which they first took root. 

Human nature is too complex to lend itself to 
precise formulation. In studying the child we 
may be able to discover attitudes due to physical 
heredity, those due to social heredity, those due to 
environment, those due to the interaction of two 
or more of these, and we may discover types of 
activity characteristic of the different stages of 
development ; but when we have finished our 

1 N. S. Shaler, The Individual, p. 78. 
60 



IN ELEMENT A RY ED UCA TION 6 1 

classification we cannot superimpose it upon any 
child so as to make it represent his whole nature. 
It is always necessary to make allowance for 
individual variation. There is something in 
each individual that escapes formulation. 

It is an accepted truth that those racial activi- 
ties which are most ancient and most prolonged 
have had the most potent influence in determin- 
ing the attitudes of mankind. Attitudes due to 
such causes appear earliest, and although they 
m«ay early be overlaid with more complex habits, 
they remain strong throughout life; and when, as 
decay sets in, the more complex habits one by one 
disappear, these native instincts reassert them- 
selves and persist till the last. 

There are instincts that have resulted from 
later racial activities, but their early appearance 
as well as their permanence is in direct propor- 
tion to the remoteness and duration of the 
activities which produced them. Comparatively 
recent racial activities certainly operate in deter- 
mining the attitudes of the child; but they oper- 
ate not through physical, but through social he- 
redity. 

Darwin is a notable example of those scientists 
who have attempted to explain human emotional 
attitudes by reference to those of animals. How- 
ever fruitful such an investigation may be, it 
seems to promise less for educational purposes 



62 THE PLACE OF INDUSTRIES 

than investigations along racial lines; for it 
must be remembered that continuity in emotional 
attitudes can be explained only on the basis of 
continuity in biological function. For this reason 
education must wait upon biological science 
until the connections needed are established, and 
even then the use of the materials offered is 
open to the charge of explaining the more clear 
by the less clear. Until we know more of the 
consciousness of animals we are scarcely in a 
position to make a profitable use of animal 
psychology in interpreting the activities of the 
child. 

When we attempt to interpret the attitudes of 
the child in the light of the activities of the race 
there is more hope of success ; for the continuity 
of the biological function upon which the con- 
tinuity of emotional attitudes depends is assured. 
But even here we are liable to error in the inter- 
pretation of the conscious states of people living 
under social conditions so much more simple 
than our own. The means of rectifying these 
errors, however, are becoming more and more 
available through the results of the different 
methods of research which serve mutually to 
check one another. The especial value of this 
method is that it reveals a rich educational sig- 
nificance to attitudes which, from the point of 
view of our more complex social life, are trivial 



IN ELEMENTAR Y ED UCA TION 6 3 

and meaningless. This method of investigation, 
more than any other, is rich in suggestions of 
ways of utilizing for educational purposes forces 
which usually are allowed to expend themselves 
without becoming the basis of social habits. 

The importance of the body in the study of 
emotional attitudes can scarcely be overrated. It is 
through the body that heredity acts. Dr. Loeb 
is authority for the statement that the only traits 
we know to be due to heredity are the form of 
the body and the instincts; and he states that for 
the inheritance of instincts "it is only necessary 
that the egg contain certain substances — which 
will determine the different tropisms — and the 
conditions for producing bilateral symmetry of 
the embryo." 1 That these substances which de- 
termine the different tropisms are the product of 
remote and long-continued racial activities is now 
recognized. How the racial activities, through 
the mediation of these " substances," have re- 
sulted in the different tropisms; how these trop- 
isms reveal the continuity of human life from the 
earliest times to the present ; how they have the 
most profound significance for educational pur- 
poses, it is the purpose of the following pages to 
make clear. 

Emotional attitudes undoubtedly owe their 
origin to physiological causes. They are organic 

Jacques Loeb, The Physiology of the Brain, p. 7. 



64 THE PLACE OF INDUSTRIES 

strains which may easily be recognized in the 
case of the coarser emotions. The difficulty in 
recognizing the organic reverberations in the case 
of the more refined emotions is on account of the 
subtlety of the movements involved. 

To understand the attitudes of the child we 
must know the activities that are bound up with 
them. Knowing, feeling, and willing are bound 
up with those activities that developed with refer- 
ence to maintaining the life of the individual and 
the race. Those activities that have for their 
object the nourishment of the individual and the 
perpetuation of the species represent the most 
fundamental processes in the life of primitive 
people. That these activities should be accom- 
panied by pleasure is an indication that, in their 
outcome, they contribute to the welfare of the 
individual and the race. It seems to be the nat- 
ural method in organic development to place a 
premium upon the activity needed to further the 
normal growth of the individual as well as the 
species. 

Long before man learned to manufacture tools 
to supplement his feeble strength he exploited 
his environment for food, which he consumed 
upon the spot, his hands, his teeth and his diges- 
tive tracts performing, unaided by mechanical 
means, the functions later lightened by the use of 
tools and mechanical devices. Activities with 



IN ELEMENTARY ED UCA TION 6 5 

reference to the exploitation of environment lie 
at the very basis of the industrial processes of all 
times. That the child early manifests such an 
instinct, and that in some form it continues 
throughout life, if not atrophied through disuse, 
is apparent to any one who will observe the hab- 
its of the people in any community. 

The most ancient activities which have pro- 
duced this instinct are undoubtedly those of the 
race during the period preceding the use of tools. 
When the whole burden of production and con- 
sumption was placed upon the body alone, there 
was need of searching for the most nutritious and 
easily digested food that the environment could 
afford. Later, when man's strength was supple- 
mented by the use of weapons, the desire for 
food and for social approval impelled him to 
become skilful in the hunt. Those activities of 
the hunting people that developed alertness with 
reference to the animal, vegetable, and mineral 
resources of the environment, that developed 
fear of that with which man felt himself unable 
to cope, and courage with reference to difficulties 
within the possibility of a successful achieve- 
ment, resulted in the most generic instincts of 
human kind. Whether the activities of fishing 
people were grafted upon these instincts, or 
whether they are as fundamental as those devel- 
oped in the hunting stage, is not known with 



66 THE PLACE OF INDUSTRIES 

certainty. Similar habits, with a difference in 
manifestation to suit the difference in the situa- 
tions, would result in either case. 

While the hunter exploited the various topo- 
graphical features with reference to the possibili- 
ties in satisfying his needs, the fisherman 
exploited the sea and the coasts. In the pas- 
toral stage this fundamental activity found ex- 
pression in the domestication of animals, in the 
search for new pastures, in the protection of 
the flocks and herds, and especially in aggress- 
ive warfare, which is but another form of ex- 
ploitation of environment for the satisfaction of 
human needs. 

Each succeeding stage of development makes 
use of this instinct in a way to suit its own needs. 
Now the exploitation takes the form of discover- 
ing the species of plants that will respond most 
readily to man's care ; again it is a search for 
earth's hidden secrets ; at one time it is an at- 
tempt to find the most favorable routes of travel 
or the most advantageous sites for trade ; at 
another it is a search for the choicest soils which 
can be made subject to man's needs by the use of 
new instruments and the means of maintaining 
collective activity. It may be a search in the sky 
for the means of determining the approach of a 
new season or a means of guiding the traveler at 
sea ; perhaps it is a series of experiments with 



IN ELEMENTARY EDUCA TION 67 

new materials in order to bring about desirable 
features accidentally revealed ; and sometimes it is 
an attempt to discover different forms of motive 
power or the means of applying the same. There 
is no need of extending the list. To make it 
complete would be to make an inventory of the 
initial steps in all forms of progress. That this 
instinct has sometimes been misdirected, that its 
influence has sometimes been detrimental to the 
best interests of society, is not due to any quality 
that inheres in the instinct itself, but to the 
fact that it has not been placed properly with 
reference to the other activities of life without 
which, except in the most elementary stages of 
life, it has no raison d'etre. 

Whether we interpret the activities of the 
earliest people of mid-Pleistocene times, when 
life was sustained by the acquisition of mate- 
rials that were consumed upon the spot with- 
out the intervention of tools, as giving rise to the 
instinct to exploit one's environment or to the 
workmanship instinct depends upon the point of 
view. Perhaps it would be the wiser plan to 
regard this period in which production and con- 
sumption are not separated in time, as the undif- 
ferentiated form out of which both emerge at a 
later date. 

The term workmanship instinct is one that is 
used somewhat loosely. As used by Professor 



68 THE PLACE OF INDUSTRIES 

Veblen * it is broad enough to include not only 
those activities involved in reshaping materials 
to suit one's needs, but the whole round of activi- 
ties to which this lesser activity is related as a 
part to a larger whole. It is possible that it is 
due to this use of the term that he has failed to 
recognize the fact that there was ample room for 
the development of prowess before the advent 
of the barbarian form of culture. If it be true, 
as is accepted by the best authorities in anthro- 
pology, that the extinction of the huge creatures 
that characterized the Pleistocene period was due 
to man's efforts, and if we can accept the state- 

1 The following quotation from Professor Veblen's article, 
"The Instinct of Workmanship and the Irksomeness of Labor," 
published in Vol. IV of the American Journal of Sociology, will 
show the sense in which he uses the term : " A process or method 
of life, once understood, assimilated in thought works into the 
scheme of life and becomes a norm of conduct, simply because 
the thinking, knowing agent is also the acting agent. What is 
apprehended with facility and is consistent with the process of 
life and knowledge is thereby apprehended as right and good. 

"Where habituation is enforced by selective elimination the 
acquired proclivity passes from the status of habit to that of 
aptitude or propensity. It becomes a transmissible trait, and 
action under its guidance becomes right and good, and the longer 
and more consistent the selective adaptation through which the 
aptitude arises the more firmly is the resulting aptitude settled 
on the race, and the more unquestioned becomes the sanction of 
the resulting canon of conduct. 

" So far as regards his relation to the material means of life, 
the canon of thought and of conduct which was in this way 
enforced upon early man was what is here called the instinct of 
workmanship." 



IN ELEMENTARY ED UCA TION 69 

ment that the pastoral stage did not develop until 
after the climate of western Europe and its char- 
acteristic fauna and flora had become similar to 
the climate and characteristic fauna and flora 
that still prevail, except as modified by human 
action, man of the Pleistocene period, who 
invented the bow and arrow and all the weapons 
which precede it, who made use of poison, traps, 
pitfalls, and countless other devices in his work 
of exterminating the creatures that impeded his 
progress, must have been characterized by a 
spirit of mastery over conditions and a disposi- 
tion to take the initiative in a greater degree than 
that for which Professor Veblen 1 gives him credit; 
and, this being the case, there is less reason to 
interpret the predatory life of the barbarian 
stage of culture as an abrupt transition in racial 
development than there would otherwise be. 

x Thorstein Veblen, Theory of the Leisure Class, p. 219. 
"The circumstances of life and the ends of human effort that pre- 
vailed before the advent of barbarian culture, shaped human 
nature and fixed it as regards certain fundamental human traits. 
And it is to these ancient, generic features that modern men are 
prone to take back in case of variation from human nature of the 
hereditary present. The conditions under which men lived in 
the most primitive stages of associated life that can properly be 
called human, seem to have been of a peaceful kind ; and the 
character — the temperament and spiritual attitude — of men 
under these early conditions of environment and institutions seems 
to have been peaceful and unaggressive, not to say an indolent, 
cast. For the immediate purpose this peaceable cultural stage 
may be taken to mark the initial phase of social development." 



70 THE PLACE OF INDUSTRIES 

For purposes of clearness the use of the term 
workmanship instinct in this discussion will be 
limited to those activities which are involved in 
the reshaping of material for purposes that suit 
man's needs. 

Even if the earliest activities which involved 
the mere acquisition of food for immediate con- 
sumption be waived, there yet remained a long 
period in this most ancient stage of culture in 
which a large share of man's energy was expended 
in constructive activities. When we consider the 
skill he acquired in working in stone, in bone, in 
shell, in horn, in wood, in ivory, in textiles, in 
skins, and in clay, the simplicity of his tools, and 
the finish of his products ; when we consider his 
insight into the nature of the materials with 
which he worked, and how he made use of this 
insight in the various processes of construction 
in such a way as to respect the limitations and 
the possibilities of each, as well as the use which 
the object was to serve ; and when we consider 
the amount of labor that was performed by these 
people, we are convinced that these activities, 
which were prolonged for so great a period, are a 
sufficient basis for the belief that the workman- 
ship instinct is one of the most deep-seated and 
permanent possessions of mankind. 

That the savage dislikes work, in the sense in 
which we commonly use the term, is true. That 



IN ELEMENTAR Y ED UCA TION 7 1 

he accomplished what we would call work, is 
equally true. What the savage objects to in our 
work is not the strain of the muscles, but the 
strain of attention. The latter is painful to him 
because it is not conducive to the welfare of 
either the individual or the species in the stage 
of culture in which he lives. Reflection in the 
savage life is a more expensive form of specializa- 
tion than the perfected instinct of any animal is 
to itself and its species. The pain which accom- 
panies intellectual activity can be interpreted only 
as a warning of nature to proceed no farther in 
that direction. 

The savage does not work according to an 
intellectually ordered plan. He works in response 
to his own feeling of need. He finds his prob- 
lems in the necessities of the situations. They 
therefore have a real significance for him. They 
call out a response. At each step of the process 
he thus feels the emotional glow that accom- 
panies the sense of enlargement of one's per- 
sonality, the mastery of a new power. As long 
as the problem appeals to him, as long as there 
is a store of nervous energy upon which to draw, 
he continues the work ; but when the problem 
loses its force, when the nervous energy is dis- 
charged, he ceases. He is unable to hold him- 
self to his work by an act of the will. His 
activity is characterized by the same lack of 



7 2 THE PL A CE OF IND US TRIES 

patience, the same lack of persistence, as is char- 
acteristic of the child when the emotional reac- 
tions fail, and by the same patience, the same 
persistence, which frequently is pushed to the 
limits of complete physical exhaustion, when the 
emotional reactions remain strong. So necessary 
are the emotional reactions to the maintenance 
of an activity, that in those monotonous activities 
that made a great demand for sustained physi- 
cal activity without occupying the mind, the 
introduction of artificial means of securing emo- 
tional reactions was almost universally practiced. 
In some cases this was accomplished merely by 
social conversation and jests made possible when 
several individuals were performing their work 
in company ; the rhythmical character of the 
automatic movements exercised such an influence 
upon the social intercourse that it often found 
expression in song. The feelings thus aroused, it 
was possible to accomplish easily tasks impossi- 
ble without such support. In the case of co- 
operative work the support of rhythm was neces- 
sary in order to regulate the co-ordinations as 
well as to sustain the activity. 

The workmanship instinct dominates some 
stages of development, to be sure, to a greater 
degree than it does others ; but no community 
can ignore the claims of this instinct for any 
length of time without serious consequences. To 



IN ELEMENT A R Y ED UCA TION 7 3 

such a degree was it the normal expression of 
each individual in the hunting and fishing stages, 
and so strong a support did it find in social 
approval that if, perchance, some individual in 
the clan failed to provide himself with proper 
weapons for the hunt, and failed to bring his 
share of meat to the common meal, he was 
excluded from participation in the common life 
of the clan. 

While the less strenuous conditions of the pas- 
toral life made less vigorous demands for the 
products of workmanship, the leisure afforded, 
together with the more regular supply of nour- 
ishing food, made available a larger store of 
nervous energy than ever before. As more 
energy was accumulated in the nerve centers 
than was needed in the serious activities of life, 
it instinctively sought expression. This expres- 
sion was naturally along the lines of established 
co-ordinations, but often without any further 
object than the activity itself. 

The pastoral stage was pre-eminently the play 
period of the race. On equally good grounds it 
may be called the period in which art made rapid 
development. Human culture had not advanced 
sufficiently to secure a clear differentiation 
between art and play. Neither was there any 
well defined boundary between work and play. 
Now an activity is more like work, in a moment 



74 THE PLACE OF INDUSTRIES 

it is more like play, and again it is art, or, possi- 
bly, all three at the same time. 

There was leisure enough at this time for a 
large amount of playful experimentation, which 
found expression in the further modification of 
instinctive activities already adapted to the social 
needs of the time. In following the herds across 
the boggy marshes it was desirable to be able to 
walk on stilts. In leisure hours the shepherds 
played in such contests. In caring for the flocks 
among the rocky chasms, the shepherd had to be 
ready at a moment's notice to leap across a gorge, 
to climb a precipitous height, or to jump across 
a mountain torrent. In their leisure hours we 
find them occupied in leaping, jumping, vaulting, 
and climbing games with the element of danger 
added, at times, by the introduction of a blazing 
fire over which the vault was to be made. On 
the uplands and grassy plains an animal that be- 
gan to stray from the herd was brought back 
by a stone thrown with or without artificial 
devices. Leisure hours saw the shepherd boys 
engaged in contests of this kind. The value of 
these games in securing the power of concentra- 
tion and the capacity for swift and sure reaction, 
is incalculable. 

Like children of today, the shepherds delighted 
in many games that were imitative of the actions 
of the domestic animals. Some of these were 



IN ELEMENTAR Y ED UCA TION 7 5 

doubtless related to serious activities, but many, 
such as the imitation of a cock-fight, appear to 
be pure play. The representation of stealing 
sheep from a village by a predatory animal or 
thief probably had a more utilitarian aspect. 
The various activities of pastoral life — domes- 
ticating the wild animals, watching the flocks, 
protecting them from animals and predatory 
tribes, seeking the lost, migrating for change of 
pasture, driving home the cows, milking, sheep- 
shearing, washing and picking the wool, carding, 
spinning, weaving, fulling, and knitting — all 
found expression in games which afforded recre- 
ation or relief from the tedium of a monotonous 
occupation. Many of these have descended, with 
little change, as a part of the heritage of all suc- 
ceeding ages. 

The Virginia reel, as is well known, is the sur- 
vival of a weaving game. Weaving songs which 
imitate the shooting of the shuttle from side to 
side, the passage of the woof over and under 
the threads of the warp, and other related activi- 
ties, are common. Weaving rhymes and panto- 
mimic dances are to be found in the folklore of 
almost every people who have practiced this 
art. 

The stage in which we find the pantomimic 
dance and song is evidently not the earliest 
stage in the development of these arts. The 



76 THE PLACE OF INDUSTRIES 

dance is a representation of a serious process. 
As women became more and more skilful in 
weaving, their bodily activities were rendered 
more and more rhythmical. As the worker sur- 
renders herself to the rhythm of the movement 
there is a tendency for the entire organism to 
respond to the rhythm, and we thus have a tone 
rhythm, which accompanies the movement rhythm. 
Sometimes words are used, but they are often 
nonsense words, being significant chiefly on ac- 
count of the support they lend to the bodily 
movements. It is very probable that mothers 
made use of these suggestions in teaching their 
daughters, and that later the activity was repre- 
sented in play. The survival of such rhymes as 
the following indicates the ancient habit of sus- 
taining the activity in a monotonous work, as 
well as the influence of the industrial occupation 
in the development of poetry and song. 

Any one who has ever used a dash churn will 
have no difficulty in recognizing the rhythmic 
activity which gave the impulse to this rhyme, 
which, no doubt, originally was accompanied 
with song: 

CHURNING RHYME. 

Come, butter, come ; come, butter, come ; 

Peter stands at the gate waiting for a butter'd cake. 

Come, butter, come. 

— Journal of American Folk-Lore, Vol. VIII, p. 82. 



IN ELEMENTARY EDUCA TION 77 

In this the rhythmic movement of the bark- 
beaters can be detected : 

Sip, sap, say ; sip, sap, say ; 

Lig in a nettle bed while (until) May day. 

— Ibid., p. 82. 

wool-carder's rhyme. 
Taary woo', taary woo', taary woo' is all to spin. 
Card it well, card it well, card it well ere you begin, 
For when carded, row'd, and spun, 
Then the work is hofelins (half) done ; 
But when woven, drest and clean, 
It may cleading (clothing) for a queen. 

— Ibid., p. 81. 

KNITTING RHYME. 

Needle to needle, and stitch to stitch, 

Pull the old woman out of the ditch. 

If you ain't out by the time I'm in, 

I'll rap your knuckles with my knitting pin. 

—Ibid. 

All of these rhymes show the effect of the more 
recent stages of culture ; but all had a very early 
origin, and, doubtless, in connection with indus- 
trial processes. Numerous illustrations can 
readily be found in the folklore of any people. 
In places not yet dominated by the influence of 
the factory, it is still possible to gather many 
songs and rhymes of this character that are still 
in use. Doubtless, most adults of this country 
have personal experience in the use of some such 
device for relieving the drudgery of a monotonous 



78 THE PLACE OF INDUSTRIES 

occupation of childhood. 1 Where school condi- 
tions are flexible enough to permit freedom of 
expression, it is possible to observe spontaneous 
manifestations of the use of rhythm in indus- 
trial occupations. 2 

Without taking the extreme position that Pro- 
fessor Bucher has taken in Arbeit und Rhythmus, 
we cannot fail to recognize that industry has had 
a powerful influence in the development of art of 
all kinds. Just as the musical instruments of the 
hunting stage were subservient to the needs of 
the people in regulating the movements in the 
hunt, and in the dance which was, in many cases, 
a preparation for or a celebration of the hunt, so 
those of the pastoral stage were such as would 

1 1 well remember hearing my mother as she tried to teach me 
how to knit, make use of this formula, " Put the needle in, put the 
thread over, pick it through , and pull it off." Since finding the more 
interesting rhyme given above, I have wondered if that would 
have been more successful in my case, and whether I should have 
been compelled to resort to as many devices as I did in order to 
hold myself to the monotonous work. The formula had little 
effect, but on being told that I must do my own knitting, I was 
able to keep at the work under the combined influence of the 
whistling cold wind, the sound of the spinning-wheel, which, 
together with the wind, in some way suggested the possibility of 
freezing, and such a regular tying of knots in the yarn at inter- 
vals of about four inches as would make it evident that I had 
made some progress when I came to a knot. 

2 During this year I have observed in the laboratory of the 
Department of Education of the University of Chicago many 
instances of this kind. Children of six years, while modelling in 
Clay, spontaneously express themselves in rhythmic parallelism. 



IN ELEMENTARY ED UCA TION 79 

facilitate the activities of the shepherd during 
his hours of work or afford him pleasure during 
his leisure hours. The development of the horn 
is closely bound up with the needs of pastoral 
people in giving a signal of alarm when watching 
the flocks. In time of war the desire to com- 
municate more precise information stimulated 
the mind to invent instruments which could be 
used to express the differences. Such instru- 
ments were invented in the hunting and fishing 
stages in connection with the co-operative activi- 
ties of those times, and were still further devel- 
oped during the pastoral period. In so far as 
the conditions of life in the pastoral stage 

On finishing modelling a chicken in clay, a little boy, apparently 
without thinking of any one in the group, said : 

Run away little chick, 

Run home, home, home. 

The following tendency toward rhythmic form was observed 
in a lesson in co-operative composition : " Beyond the plots was 
the cultivated land. Outside the cultivated land were broad 
strips of pasture land. Beyond this was woodland." 

A group of children, aged nine years, when polishing pen 
trays that they had made, spontaneously began to recount their 
experience in the earlier, less interesting processes. As they 
continued the monotonous movement of rubbing in the wax, a 
girl said that she was washing her baby's face. A boy rejoined 
that he was getting his little boy ready for school. The sug- 
gested images furnished an emotional reaction which seemed to 
afford the children much satisfaction, and probably were quite 
similar in effect to that of the conversation and jests of primitive 
people when engaged in individual work in the company of 
others. 



80 THE PLACE OF INDUSTRIES 

afforded freedom to the individual to express his 
thoughts and feelings for the sake of the pleas- 
ure in the activity itself, poetry and music were 
freed from the necessities of industrial occupa- 
tions ; but because nature places a premium upon 
the co-ordinations necessary to maintain the 
necessary activities of life, and because of the 
need of being ready for an emergency, the art 
and play activities of the period are along the 
lines marked out by the industrial activities of 
the race. 

The problems presented by the agricultural 
life were so much more complex, and the end 
was so much farther removed, that there was dif- 
ficulty in fixing the attention to the problem ; 
the reflexes were lost and the emotional reaction 
was not secured. It was impossible under these 
conditions for the worker to continue the activity 
for its own sake. Interest, if secured, had to 
come through the perception of the relation of 
the activity to a desired end, or through the real- 
ization of the moral and ethical ideas involved. 
Where free labor prevailed there arose in 
response to this need a series of festivals, par- 
taking more or less of a religious character, 
marking each important phase of the whole 
round of activities, from the clearing of the 
ground to the harvesting and storing of the 
crops. In this way attention was fixed, and the 
needed response secured. 



IN ELEMENT A RY ED UCA TION 8 1 

It is very probable that many who shared in 
these festivities acted in response to the immedi- 
ate stimulus of the occasion without thought of 
the more distant end ; yet the importance that 
the harvest festival assumed as marking the cul- 
mination of the entire activity served to fix 
attention upon the end, while the whole series 
gradually exercised an educative influence far 
beyond the immediate utilitarian need. 

The festive character of many agricultural 
activities has been maintained until within recent 
times, when the introduction of more complicated 
machinery has so lightened the burdens that it 
is no longer necessary to rely upon such means 
of support. The distaste for agricultural life 
which is so common among young people is 
largely due at present not so much to the work 
itself, as to the fact that in the separation of 
industrial processes from festivals the emotional 
element of the latter, instead of becoming trans- 
lated into an art interest, has, in too many cases, 
suffered atrophy from disuse. 

While tribes in which free labor prevailed were 
solving their labor problems, as just stated, other 
tribes, particularly those shepherd tribes that 
were being compelled to take up agriculture on 
account of the pressure of new populations upon 
lands that had already reached their limit in 
supplying the needs of pastoral people, were 



82 THE PLACE OF INDUSTRIES " 

working out the solution of their problems in a 
different way. Accustomed to the easy life of 
the pastoral people, which afforded the emo- 
tional reactions of art and play as well as the 
stronger ones of war, it was not strange that they 
preferred it to the settled agricultural life. But it 
was necessary to till the soil ; so they preserved 
the lives of captives in war and required them to 
render assistance in the work of cultivating the 
land. 

In the early stages of slavery there was little 
difference between the position of master and 
slave. Both did the same kind of work. With 
the increase in the number of slaves and in the 
property of the master it became necessary to 
organize the slave labor in gangs with overseers. 
Labor thus became compulsory, and disgrace 
was attached to the unfortunate members of 
society who became the victims of a stronger 
power. Society was cleft in twain, and the chasm 
has not yet been completely bridged. From this 
time labor became distasteful to the leisure class 
not so much on its own account, as because of its 
associations with an inferior class and with 
domesticated animals. It was conceived as 
requiring little intelligence. It became irksome 
to the slave because the problem was external to 
his own interests and needs. He was no longer 
free to choose his problems or to control the 



IN ELEMENTARY EDUCA TION 83 

conditions under which he carried on his work. 
Deprived of the conditions for attention, the 
organism failed to respond, and the emotional 
reactions were thus lost. 

Succeeding stages of culture have tended to 
perpetuate the distinction between the leisure 
and the industrial classes first drawn in the 
pastoral and agricultural" stages. Labor, which 
at first was a free manifestation of the whole 
being and the part of each member of society, 
came to be a forced expression of muscular move- 
ment of certain members of society. As society 
became more and more fixed in castes, labor of 
certain kinds was conceived not merely as igtioble, 
but as wro?ig, and a taboo was placed on many 
forms of activity. 

The freeing of the slaves and serfs in the latter 
part of the Middle Ages helped to restore normal 
conditions of labor. But the long ages of servi- 
tude had done much to overlay the primitive 
instincts that underlie industrial processes with 
such habits of submission and indifference that 
it was not possible for them to reassert them- 
selves in their native vigor for some time. Nor 
have they been able to accomplish this work 
during ages that have succeeded. Although the 
removal of external restrictions witnessed a 
remarkable manifestation of the inventive spirit 
in the application of wind and water power to 



84 THE PLACE 01 INDUSTRIES 

industrial processes, the breaking up of the pro- 
cess of production into lesser activities, and the 
assignment of each division to some particular 
craft, has, in a measure, ^counteracted the advance 
movement, which was taking place at this time. 
The handicraft worker, deprived of the rich, 
broad experience afforded by the free house 
industries of the earlier period, when each indi- 
vidual carried on the whole round of activities 
from the search for the raw material to the con- 
sumption of the finished product, developed 
special skill at the expense of an all-round ex- 
perience. Yet in spite of this the handicrafts- 
man, as compared with the factory laborer of 
today, had considerable range for the exercise 
of his ability. Handicraft labor, so long as it 
was treated in an artistic spirit, reacted in a 
wholesome way upon the worker, who became 
more intelligent, more interested in his work, and 
consequently happier. The direct relation which 
was maintained between the producer and con- 
sumer at this time served to maintain ethical 
relations in the industrial activities of the period. 
The application of simple machinery to the 
various manufacturing processes during the elev- 
enth, twelfth, and thirteenth centuries involved 
an advance in the organization and division of 
labor. Work, which heretofore had in most 
cases been a personal occupation, now became a 



IN ELEMENTARY ED UCA TION 8 5 

civic function. 1 The removal of the end of labor 
added new dignity to the process. It afforded 
the worker the joy of hope and the conscious- 
ness of an enlarged personality. The mind 
became less occupied with the particular ques- 
tions of the moment and more interested in 
questions of general welfare. The spirit of 
exploitation, which manifested itself in the Cru- 
sades, in the establishment of great commercial 
companies, and in the exploration of the New 
World, reacted upon society and thus created a 
demand for more powerful motive forces and 
more adequate means of application than ever 
before. The development of science in modern 
times is largely a response to this demand. 

Industry, enriched by the contributions of sci- 
ence, becomes more and more complex. The 
end becomes farther and farther removed. The 
worker, no longer being able to perceive the 
whole process of production, has need of a greater 
consciousness of collective life than ever before. 
His activity is no longer a personal occupation that 
brings him honor as in the period of house-indus- 
tries, nor a civic function, the actions and inter- 
actions of which are within the range of his per- 
ception, as in the period of handicraft labor, but 
a social function in a national if not a cosmopoli- 
tan society. 

1 August Comte, Positive Polity, Vol. Ill, p. 413. 



86 THE PLACE OF INDUSTRIES 

That the welfare of the workers has been lost 
sight of in the excitement attending such stu- 
pendous changes, is not strange. The balance 
has become lost between the character of the 
machine and motive power on the one hand, and 
the intellectual and moral condition of the worker 
on the other. To restore this balance it is nec- 
essary to parallel the advance in the character of 
the machinery and the motive power by an 
improvement in the intellectual and spiritual 
condition of the worker. He must be able to 
perceive the relation of the small part of the 
work which he undertakes to the entire process 
from its earliest to its latest stages. He must 
have such a sense of responsibility as will enable 
him to have as great regard for the character of 
the work that he produces for a foreign market, 
as for that produced for a consumer in the imme- 
diate neighborhood where he is well known. In 
short, the industrial development that has ad- 
vanced from being a function of the household 
to that of the city, and finally to that of the 
nation and nations of the earth, needs to be par- 
alleled by an enlargement of social consciousness 
from the personal, through the municipal, to 
such a consciousness as recognizes the brother- 
hood of all men. Not until this consciousness 
is aroused will it be possible for the problem, in 
its entirety, to be present in the mind of the 



IN ELEMENTAR Y ED UCA TION 8 7 

individual worker. Only when it is thus present, 
only when labor is a voluntary expression, is the 
full moral value of the act secured. 

In so far as the development of industry has 
made a separation between industry and art ; in 
so far as the substitution of machinery for hand 
labor has resulted in the decline of the festival 
in connection with the more laborious forms of 
work, there is need of some more adequate pro- 
vision for the satisfaction of the emotions than 
is found in the work itself. Just as the intellect 
needs the illumination that comes from the contri- 
butions of science, so the emotions need the sus- 
taining and socializing power of art. The recog- 
nition of this fact is the root of the more recent 
advance in municipal government, and it prom- 
ises much for the future of the public schools. 

Such are some of the origins of the attitudes 
of the child toward activity. In the beginning, 
when societies were simple and unstable, physical 
heredity was the most potent factor in determin- 
ing the attitude, although it was always modified 
by the exigencies of the natural and social envi- 
ronment. With the growth of more complex 
societies social heredity, in the form of tradi- 
tions, customs, and habits of conduct, plays a 
more and more important part in forming the 
attitudes of mind through the agency of social 
approval. In proportion as activities modified 



88 THE PLACE OF INDUSTRIES 

by social standards are remote and long con- 
tinued are they transmuted into psychical atti- 
tudes. So in the child of today there is present 
not merely the original psychical attitude of the 
most remote period, but such attitudes reduced and 
embodied in new and more complicated co-ordi- 
nations. The more recent modifications of racial 
activities operate in society today, not through 
physical heredity, but through social heredity. 
Society in each age offers a premium of approval 
on the activity that is deemed at the time most 
necessary. 

In proportion as society lays hold of instinctive 
reactions and harnesses them to present social 
needs, the process of education is promoted. The 
most serious mistake has been the tendency to 
ignore the psychical attitudes of the child by im- 
posing upon him the highly organized products of 
present social life. It is beginning to be more gen- 
erally recognized, however, that education, to be 
vital, must be grounded deep in physical heredity, 
and to be of real social service, must be guided 
and refined in the light of our highest social 
ideals. The natural emotional reactions are 
fixed, and we need not expect any fundamental 
change. It is the part of wisdom to build upon 
this sure foundation rather than to seek one 
among the shifting sands of more recent times. 
The achievements of recent civilization are of 



IN ELEMENTARY EDUCA TION 89 

value not in determining the foundation, but in 
fashioning the structure that is reared upon it. 

Because the life of the child, with reference to 
that of the adult, is an embryonic life ; because it 
is the period for the formation rather than for 
the serious use of co-ordinations, with reference 
to adult life it is a period of preparation. But 
however valuable such an idea may be to the 
adult in the consideration of educational ques- 
tions, it offers no adequate motive to the child. 
Not until the mind is able to conceive of an end 
and the relation of the successive steps in the 
means to this end, can the idea of the serious 
work of the future have any direct influence in 
shaping the motives of the child. Not until this 
power is more fully developed than we find it in 
the period of childhood can it be relied upon to 
such a degree as to be an important factor in de- 
termining the attitude of the child. The child 
lives in the present. He must find his satisfac- 
tion in an immediate way. His pleasurable emo- 
tions are bound up with his instinctive reactions. 
Because these reactions have been marked out 
by the serious activities of the race in its first 
steps in human progress, because they represent 
the processes of modern civilization in their most 
rudimentary forms, they serve to present the edu- 
cational opportunity for establishing helpful rela- 
tions between the life of the past and that of the 



90 THE PLA CE OF INDUSTRIES 

present. By making use of these instinctive 
reactions it is possible to make a gradual transi- 
tion from the dramatic and play interests of the 
child to the more serious interests of the adult. 

Although childhood has not yet been studied 
carefully enough so that it is possible to know 
with scientific accuracy the best time to lay hold 
of each of the various emotional reactions, enough 
is known to make it no longer justifiable to con- 
fine education to formulated intellectual concep- 
tions that have no meaning apart from the pro- 
cess of which they form but one of the less 
important phases. It is now evident to thought- 
ful people who have given attention to these 
questions, thatjf we would develop the powers of 
the child, we must utilize and refine those instinct- 
ive reactions that are seeking expression, and 
that, if we would cultivate in him a social con- 
sciousness to a degree sufficient to enable him to 
live an ethical life in a complex social system, 
we must furnish him the means of participating 
in the more fundamental processes of life to such 
a degree as to afford him a measuring unit by 
means of which he can interpret materials which 
are presented to him in less direct ways. Only 
in this way is it possible for the child to appreci- 
ate the significance of different activities and 
their relative place in the organization of society. 

The fact that few of the child's activities under 



IN ELEMENTARY ED UCA TION g I 

ordinary conditions result in products of com- 
mercial value favors, rather than obstructs, the 
educational process. There is less inclination on 
the part of society to withdraw the child from 
the more direct educational influences than would 
otherwise be the case. This fact operates also 
in determining what forms the activity may take. 

The demand for the completion of a situation 
is characteristic of the mind in all stages of 
development, but it takes less to complete it in 
some stages than in others. For this reason the 
earlier activities of children along industrial lines 
comprehend a much shorter circuit than the later. 
While the processes of production and consump- 
tion which represent the complete situation — 
the entire circuit— may be so simple in the kin- 
dergarten as to be scarcely distinguishable from 
each other, the process grows more and more 
complex until, in the later years of childhood, it 
represents a comprehensive view of the typical 
phases of the more complex industrial processes. 

In so far as the marginal difference between 
the child's interests and his power to satisfy 
them in a real way presents a stimulus that 
retains its power to the end, real construction 
finds its place as an instrument in education. 
To deprive the child of the opportunity to con- 
struct objects of real utility would be to remove 
certain wholesome limits, which are quite neces- 



92 THE PLACE OF INDUSTRIES 

sary in order that he may learn to make his 
adjustments in the world in which he lives. To 
confine his activity to such processes would be 
to seriously limit his development. 

Interest and the power to do, seldom or never 
form an equation. Where interest is greatly in 
excess illustration, rather than real construction, 
finds its place. The illustration may be of the 
constructive type, but it differs from it in being 
intended chiefly to satisfy the demand for a 
rich imagery rather than to serve any direct 
utilitarian purpose. Such a situation presents a 
favorable opportunity for the development of 
technique. There is a normal motive for it at 
this time. The time devoted to technique under 
such circumstances depends upon the time the 
child is able to keep in view the relation between 
the technical work and the whole of which it is 
merely a phase. 

In so far as the completion of the situation 
requires the child to exploit his own environ- 
ment in the search for real or illustrative mate- 
rials of industrial processes, observation and sim- 
ple experimentation find their place. In so far 
as it requires the modification of old habits to 
new purposes in the process of manufacture, 
experimentation finds its place. In so far as it 
requires a recognition of the satisfaction that 
comes with the consumption of the results of 



IN ELEMENTARY ED UCA TION 9 3 

production, occasions which provide for this need, 
such as social entertainments and exhibitions, 
find their place as a supplement to the more 
regular demands of the home and the school. 

With the child, as with the race, the pleasure 
that comes from the direct exercise of bodily 
activities becomes more and more subordinate to 
that which comes from the augmentation or 
transformation of muscular power through the 
use of tools, and later to that which springs from 
the substitution of animal or physical and chemi- 
cal forces. During this process there is an 
increasing demand for intellectual activity, which, 
by its effectiveness in substituting other forces 
than those of the human body in the processes 
of industry, secures more and more favorable 
conditions for a freer expression of the emotions 
than was possible when bodily activity was so 
largely subservient to industrial needs. At a 
later stage the intellect acquires freedom in the 
same way. The freeing of the emotions mani- 
fests itself in art, while the freeing of the intel- 
lect manifests itself in science. Both were orig- 
inally bound up in the industrial process, both 
are conditioned by it for a long period, and both 
separate themselves for a time from this process 
only to return again to give and to receive fresh 
impulse to a higher activity. 

If the increase in power is not accompanied by 



94 THE PLACE OF INDUSTRIES 

the enlargement of social consciousness, it is apt 
to manifest itself in a dominating or competitive 
spirit. If, however, the socializing process pro- 
ceeds in harmony with the increasing power and 
means of control, the force which would other- 
wise express itself in a competitive way manifests 
itself in co-operation. The transformation of 
power from the purely competitive to the co-oper- 
ative form takes rise in the need of greater force 
than the individual can produce or in an appli- 
cation of force that is possible only with the 
combined action of several persons. By means 
of rhythm people learn to work together and in 
so doing become conscious of the value of 
co-operative action within certain limits. How 
these limits are gradually extended so as to 
include larger and larger groups, how purely 
commercial relations established between groups 
lead to the recognition of helpful social relations, 
how the application of new forces by more and 
more highly complicated machinery makes the 
recognition of national and international rela- 
tions necessary — these are questions that are 
significant to society; and because they are signi- 
ficant to society they are of vital importance in 
education. The development of the spirit of 
co-operation does not imply a disuse of the 
spirit of conflict. The instinct which underlies 
this spirit was developed so early and during 



IN ELEMENTARY ED UCA TION 9 5 

such a long period that, do what we may, it will 
abide as one of our most permanent possessions. 1 
It means, rather, a gradual refining of the method 
of conflict and a restriction of it to fields that 
are legitimate with reference to the other inter- 
ests of community life. 

The original impulse to manual training came 
from the house industries, not from the handi- 
crafts. 2 As a mode of production it is not desirable 
to perpetuate either except within certain limits. 
As a means of education there seems to be noth- 
ing so well suited to bring about an adjustment 
between the attitudes of the child and the later 
differentiated subjects of knowledge, which each 
individual needs to appropriate, as the house 
industries. 3 The difference between the house 

1 W. I. Thomas, " The Gaming Instinct," American Journal 
of Sociology, Vol. VI, p. 750. 

2 Carl Bucher, Industrial Evolution, p. 155. 

3 Such statements as the following from George H. Bryant, 
in the Manual Training Magazine, July, 1901, p. 205, fail to dis- 
tinguish between the educational process and the final result, as 
well as between the emotional attitudes of the child and those of 
the adult. It is probable that there will be much confusion in 
thought along these lines until we distinguish more carefully 
between the meaning of utility to the adult and to the child, as 
well as between the social and psychological needs of the different 
periods of life. Mr. Bryant writes : " No tool or process should 
be retained in a course after its general use in the mechanical 
world has passed. Such courses, like the shops employing the 
obsolete methods, soon become 'back numbers.' Such an obso- 
lete exercise or process may have a certain ' disciplinary value,' 
or use as a practice piece ; but mere disciplinary exercises, with- 
out practical application, should have no more place in a school- 



96 THE PLACE OF INDUSTRIES 

industries and the handicrafts is this : the house 
industries introduce the child in a vital way to a 
great number of materials and afford him activity 
in a great variety of processes. The handicrafts 
require a concentration of attention upon some 
one form of production and a mastery of that. 
The house industries are significant in their fit- 
ness to present situations for the breaking up of 
instincts into a great variety of combinations. 
The handicrafts, on the other hand, are signifi- 
cant in their tendency to narrow the range of 
interests and fix habits, which are broken up with 
difficulty in later years. 

The handicrafts and machinery labor have a 
place in elementary education, but it is a differ- 
ent one from that of the house industries. The 
house industries correspond to the many-sided 
interests and activities of the child that can 
be most fruitfully cultivated in the early years. 
The handicraft and factory systems correspond, 
rather, to the differentiation that begins to take 
place in interests during the later years of child- 
hood, and should be so treated as to preserve for 
the child the view of the essential factors in the 
complete situation. It is here that education 
begins to make more vigorous demands upon both 
science and art. 

shop course nowadays than in arithmetic or grammar. The same 
or sufficient discipline can be obtained with infinitely greater 
stimulus by a problem having a direct practical bearing." 



CHAPTER IV. 

PRACTICAL APPLICATIONS. 
GUIDING PRINCIPLES. 

At the beginning of the preceding chapter we 
had occasion to state the principles upon which 
the continuity of psychical attitudes aepends. 
We there stated that continuity in psychical atti- 
tudes depends upon continuity in biological 
function, and concluded that for educational 
purposes, at least, little is to be gained at present 
by the study of animal activities. It was further 
stated that even though continuity in biological 
functions were established, until we know more 
of the states of consciousness of animals, the 
method of interpreting the activities of the child 
by those of the animal would be to still further 
complicate the question, because we are more 
familiar with the child than with the animal. In 
the case of explaining the attitudes of the child 
by those of primitive people we found that it is 
possible to make the biological connection, and 
that the inaccuracies resulting from the failure to 
interpret the conscious states of the savage can 
be rectified by the results of other methods of 
study. We stated also that those activities 
which are most remote and most prolonged are 

97 



9 8 THE PLA CE OF IND US TRIES 

most permanent in their effect upon the instinct- 
ive reactions of all times, and that later activities, 
in so far as they affect the psychical attitudes, 
appear later in the development of the individual, 
and are less permanent. 

We found that those attitudes that represent 
the emotional reactions of organic strains under- 
gone in the serious activities of primitive people 
have not been transmitted unchanged, but have 
suffered reduction and become incorporated in 
new co-ordinations through the influence of suc- 
ceeding activities. They appear in the child 
today as play-impulses, which only in an ideal- 
ized way represent the serious activities of indus- 
trial life. 

We also have considered briefly the situation 
in which man was placed in the successive 
periods, his equipment, the character of his prob- 
lems, and his manner of response. We have seen 
how in these as in the attitudes themselves there 
has been a gradual change from the simple to the 
more and more complex. 

We have now to consider what the guiding 
principles are with reference to the application 
of the results of this study to the practical work 
in the different stages of development in the ele- 
mentary-school period. Keeping in mind the 
changes in the psychical attitudes as well as those 
in the natural and social environment, we ought 



IN ELEMENTARY ED UCA TION 99 

to be able to separate from the tangled web in a 
particular situation those factors that are due to 
the special age and those that are characteristic 
of all time. We ought to be able to separate 
the factors in a given activity that are due to the 
operation of temporary conditions in the natural 
or social environment from those that are due to 
the permanent forces of the environment or to 
the organism itself. Unless we are able to dis- 
tinguish the transient from the permanent factors 
in experience, we are scarcely in a position to 
utilize the stores that the past has to yield. 

Whatever activity we consider, of whatever 
age, if it be a significant one we find that it is 
because of its relation to its natural and social 
environment. Any activity is what it is largely 
because of the natural and social environment 
in which it is placed. History is full of records 
of abortive inventions, which were such not be- 
cause of the thought in the mind of the inventor, 
but because there was not present a social need, 
or because there was not present the material 
by means of which the thought could secure ade- 
quate expression. It was not an accident that 
the mariner's compass, gunpowder, and the print- 
ing press appeared when they did. Neither was 
it an accident that the pyramids were erected in 
regions abounding with limestone and syenite, or 
that sculpture developed so remarkably in the 

L.ofC. 



100 THE PLACE OF INDUSTRIES 

region containing the whitest, finest, and richest 
marble quarries in the world. The permanent 
element in all these activities is the fact that the 
activity is directly related to the natural and 
social environment of the age and not to that of 
some other place or time. 

Let us apply this truth to the education of the 
child. How are we to make sure that the child's 
activities are with reference to his own environ- 
ment ? The question of natural environment 
presents no serious difficulty ; what constitutes 
the child's social environment is a question that 
the American people have not yet settled. That 
it has been rapidly extended in the past two 
decades is very apparent ; that it will gradually 
be simplified in the future is probable. We 
would not, like Rousseau, remove the child from 
almost all social influences, but we would guard 
him from the highly artificial stimuli of our com- 
plex social life. To present the child with such 
complex stimuli at the stage when he naturally 
responds in a simple and direct way, is to force 
upon him prematurely a complex reaction. It is 
a question of premature specialization. The type 
of the child's social relations may be sought in 
his spontaneous activities and in the typical 
activities of the earlier stages of culture. The 
particular manifestation of this type must be de- 
termined not by the past, nor by the standards 



IN ELEMENTAR Y ED UCA TION 1 1 

of adult life, but by the social needs of the child 
of today. 

It must not be forgotten that that which satis- 
fies the child's need of play is as much the 
satisfaction of his social need as that which satis- 
fies a serious need in the life of an adult. The 
demand that the activity be related to the social 
needs of the child must then be interpreted so as 
to afford ample room for the satisfaction of the 
need of play. 

Taking into consideration the transformations 
that have taken place with reference to the 
psychical attitudes, we may conclude that with 
reference to the child we have separated the 
transient from the permanent when we have 
selected from an experience that which appeals 
to the emotional attitude that is in most need of 
development, and when we have provided an 
opportunity for the child to make use of his en- 
vironment in responding to the stimulus. When 
the child manifests an attitude corresponding to 
the activities of a simpler stage of life, if he be 
encouraged to exploit his environment with ref- 
erence to satisfying this dominant instinct, and 
if the experience thus gained be enriched by the 
race experience to which it is a parallel, he is 
making vital relations with his own natural en- 
vironment and constructing such a social one as 
corresponds to his power to appreciate. Atten- 



102 THE PLACE OF INDUSTRIES 

tion directed to normal ways of utilizing the ener- 
gies of the child will prevent an immense amount 
of mischief, which is the result of unemployed or 
misdirected energy. The statement that the 
child's activities should be with reference to his 
own natural environment should not be construed 
to mean that the world beyond the child's sense 
perception should be closed to him, but rather 
that he utilize his own environment in his attempt 
to understand that which is beyond the range of 
his senses. The form of the problem and its 
general character persist ; the content is subject 
to change. 

The socializing power that comes from a well- 
directed study of the past is secured chiefly 
through the recognition of the principle that in the 
adaptation of the materials of the past such a con- 
densation of the experience of ages should be 
telescoped into the activities of a few hours as 
corresponds to the parallel changes in the child's 
attitudes with reference to their more instinctive 
origin. To attempt to carry the child through 
the actual stages of racial development in a mi- 
nute way would be to arrest development ; the 
child represents something of the present as well 
as of the past. Although the child enters sym- 
pathetically into the problems of primitive life, 
he never for a moment identifies himself with the 
people except in a dramatic way. He is looking 



IN ELEMENTARY EDUCA TION 103 

down from above, and he knows it. At the same 
time he is leading up to a fuller realization of 
forces in his own life which, hitherto, have been 
unrelated. 

It is important also in making use of the ma- 
terials of the past that we distinguish between 
the experiences of free and slave peoples. While 
it is instructive to disGpver how slavery arose, 
and under what conditions it developed, it is 
surely not the part of wisdom to attempt to per- 
petuate such conditions ; we should rather seek 
to avoid them. 

In seeking in the past for typical activities to 
be adapted to educational purposes it is impor- 
tant to bear in mind that while the child is still 
in the stage of undeveloped technique, a highly 
educative value may be secured by exercise in 
the simple house industries, if only the simple 
technical processes involved are applied " in the 
simplest and at the same time most comprehen- 
sive manner." 1 As the child develops in techni- 
cal skill he may be introduced to more and more 
complicated tools, but at no time should the 
complexity of the technique that is represented 
by the tool be such as to destroy the rela- 
tion that should always be preserved between 
the skill of the child and the character of his 
tools. 

*Carl Bucher, Industrial Evolution, p. 42. 



104 THE PLACE OF INDUSTRIES 

With these more general statements regarding 
the limits within which racial experiences may 
be utilized for educational ends, let us pass to the 
more practical consideration of the character of 
the materials adapted to the psychical attitudes 
of the successive stages of child life. 

STAGE OF INFANCY. 

The most fundamental steps in the establish- 
ment of community life have ever been those of 
establishing helpful relations with one's environ- 
ment. How to come into sympathetic relations 
with the earth and its raw materials, how to estab- 
lish helpful relations with neighboring peoples, 
are problems that all people, who have advanced, 
have had to face. The solutions of these prob- 
lems furnish the foundation upon which civiliza- 
tion rests. Just because the scientific interests are 
not yet differentiated from the industrial, because 
the intellectual interests are not differentiated 
from the practical, because the emotional ele- 
ment is not yet free to express itself on its own 
account, there is no separation between industry, 
science, and art. Those interests which corre- 
spond most closely to the scientific interest find 
in industry their excuse for being; those which 
correspond most closely to the later differentiated 
art interests are present at this time as a quality 
corresponding to an attitude of mind. 



IN ELEMENTAR V ED UCA TION 1 5 

If by the scientific attitude is meant the desire 
to discover facts and to verify principles, it does 
not appear before the period of adolescence, and 
probably not until that stage is well advanced. If, 
however, the scientific attitude is construed as 
meaning a phase of experience that is not freed 
from the social and practical needs of the child, 
yet, when taken in such relations, has a profound 
significance, the case is different. 

The first efforts of the infant are with reference 
to his environment. And although he is confined 
by the necessities of the case to a limited space, and 
obliged to use his hands to assist in locomotion, 
no one doubts the thoroughness of his exploita- 
tion. Like primeval man, who has not yet devel- 
oped free hands and an erect posture, he is unable 
to use tools. His only tools are in his body, and 
he is just beginning to learn their use. The 
motive power at his disposal is furnished by his 
own muscles. His first activities are largely in- 
stinctive ; but he soon begins the process of 
experimentation by means of which the inherited 
instincts, so well fitted to serve a few needs, 
become broken up so as to meet the demands of 
many. The achievements of early infancy, which 
lasts until about the age of two and one-half years, 
are the co-ordination of the reflexes connected 
with the various senses, a ready response to sense 
stimuli, the acquisition of milk-teeth which affect 



1 06 THE PLA CE OF IND USTRIES 

the problem of nutrition, and the erect posture 
which relieves the hands from the function of 
locomotion and sets them free for higher pur- 
poses. 

During the period of later infancy, 1 which lasts 
from two and a half years until seven or eight, the 
child begins to exploit an environment which 
takes in not only the home and its immediate 
surroundings, but the school and the immediate 
neighborhood. The tendency to run away which 
has been noticed in the third year is an expres- 
sion of the disposition to explore the environ- 
ment. 

Later infancy is pre-eminently the period of 
play, and it is for the satisfaction of the play 
instincts that the environment is exploited. The 
child's interest in a snowstorm is largely bound 
up with the pleasurable experiences of sight and 
touch which he experiences if allowed to be out 
of doors while it is snowing; or it may be the 
anticipation of the delight of playing snowball, 
making a snow man, or rolling and tumbling in 
the snow without any further object than the 
pleasure the activity affords. The changing phe- 
nomena of the seasons are significant to the child 
of this period chiefly because of their relation to 

1 The classifications of the stages of psychical development fol- 
lowed is that given by Professor Dewey in his syllabus of Educa- 
tional Psychology, pp. 8-10. 



IN ELEMENTARY EDUCA TION 107 

his play. To lay hold of this interest, to direct 
it so that it will lead to useful ends, to enrich the 
narrow personal experience by that of the group, 
and to supplement both by stories of animals and 
of people whose activities are conditioned by the 
phenomenon under consideration at the time, is 
the part of parents and teachers. The impulse to 
utilize the results of the more striking natural 
phenomena is so strong that it will assert itself in 
spite of repressive measures. Observation seems 
to indicate that this is not true with respect to 
the utilization of the more constant elements of 
environment. 

The development of the factory system, by 
crowding people into large cities, has tended 
to deprive many children of the opportunity 
to come into close contact with nature. But 
even under more favorable conditions there has 
been a tendency in the home, as well as in the 
school, to superimpose upon the child empty 
reproductions of complex social life. This is 
nowhere more clearly illustrated than in the do- 
main of children's amusements. The marvelous 
increase in the number and variety of children's 
toys is a subject worthy of more serious attention 
than it has yet received. Even a superficial ob- 
servation of these toys indicates that many of 
them are of such a character as to leave the child 
comparatively passive. The activity is handed 



1 08 THE PLA CE OF IND USTRIES 

over to a mechanism. The child gets his emo- 
tional excitement without regard to its legitimate 
expenditure. The balance between the sensory 
and motor nerves is destroyed, the organic cir- 
cuit is broken, the tendency to rely on an exter- 
nal stimulus is fostered. The mere fact that the 
stimulus calls for so little motor response is suf- 
ficient to explain its temporary effect and the 
constant demand for some new means of stimu- 
lation. 

Could parents and teachers take even a few 
minutes a day or a few hours a week to help 
children to see the possibilities in a pile of sand, 
an unoccupied piece of ground, the tough grasses 
and woody fibers growing in the waste places, a 
neighboring tree, dry-goods boxes, paper and 
paste, in short, in any of the legitimate materials 
in the environment of the child, there would be a 
saving of time for adults and a more normal and 
happy growth in the child. Such conditions would 
afford a normal outlet for the constructive in- 
stincts, which need nutrition at this period when 
the hands are first free to serve their needs. 

The injurious effect that our highly organized 
social environment is apt to exert upon the child 
may be largely nullified if, at this time, the child 
be supplied with sufficient wholesome nutrition 
for his impulses that are striving for expression. 
There is no doubt that the child gets greater 



IN ELEMENTARY ED UCA TION 1 09 

satisfaction in activities that are normal to his 
stage of development than in those for which he 
is not yet ready. But if prevented in any way 
from realizing himself through normal activities, 
he inevitably occupies himself with that which 
cannot fail to harm him because of its lack of 
adjustment to his needs. 

In the earlier part of this period, personal 
experience is enlarged by participating in the life 
of the group, and by stories of people and ani- 
mals under similar situations ; in the later part, 
it may be enriched by leading out from those 
activities of the child which are a crude imita- 
tion of the activities of adults about him, to the 
activities of people in a similar natural environ- 
ment — so far as climatic conditions are con- 
cerned — but a simpler social environment. 
Agricultural life, preferably that before the 
introduction of complicated machinery, and 
simple village life afford excellent materials for 
this purpose. On the other hand, experience of 
this period may be enriched by leading out from 
the artificial products that are significant to the 
child, to the people engaged in the preparation 
and transportation of the same. This makes 
more vigorous demands upon the child's con- 
structive imagination than the preceding, but it 
seems to meet a demand on the part of a child 
of six years for the links that unite him to that 



1 1 THE PLA CE OF IND USTRIES 

which is beyond the limits of his sense per- 
ception. 

Throughout this period the child shows a 
strong interest in animals and plants. He is 
interested in some animals because they are his 
playfellows. It is largely a social interest. He 
is interested in others because he wants to see 
what they will do. Seldom, under ordinary con- 
ditions, does the interest at this period have any 
relation to the question of food. The child's 
interest in animals can be most profitably utilized 
in home-life on the farm, but even the crowded 
part of a city can offer something to the child in 
this respect. It is an easy matter to gather 
cocoons, and their transformation into moths or 
butterflies is a wonderful revelation to the little 
ones who are fortunate enough to see it. Canaries 
are always of interest to children, who well may be 
allowed to care for them. Fish, frogs, and other 
animal forms may be brought into the schoolroom 
for a time if aquaria are available. An occasional 
visit of a domestic animal is welcomed by the chil- 
dren. The value of the visits of animal friends 
depends largely upon the attention given by the 
teacher and children to the conditions which will 
provide for the needs of the animals during their 
stay. To hire a man to do all the work neces- 
sary in order to bring an animal into the school- 
room is to deprive the child of the chief value of 



IN ELEMENTAR Y ED UCA TION 1 1 1 

the occurrence. It would seem to be a better 
plan for the teacher and children to consider the 
matter together, to decide what animal they 
should like to have in the room for a few days, 
to find out what animals are available, how they 
are living now, what they will need if they come, 
and what provisions can be made to satisfy these 
needs. If, after such conferences and investiga- 
tions as are necessary in order to determine these 
points, the children are disposed to undertake 
the responsibilities, they may be given such 
assistance as may be needed in order to make 
everything ready. By putting the subject in 
this light the children readily see the need of 
doing what is done ; and if failure to meet 
their responsibilities in regard to the care of the 
animal results in its return to its native environ- 
ment, they can readily see the justice of the act. 
By emphasizing the thought of care and pro- 
tection in this practical way the child's instincts, 
which at times lead to cruelty, become tempered 
by the social forces of present life. His instincts 
with reference to animal life are recognized suffi- 
ciently to give him satisfaction, while social 
forces operate sufficiently to adapt their expres- 
sion to the social life of the community in which 
he lives. These habits are of more importance 
than the knowledge that he gains, though that 
may be considerable. 



1 1 2 THE PLA CE OF IND US TRIES 

The child's interest in the plant-world and its 
products is much more closely related to the 
food interest than his interest in animals. The 
country child very early learns where to look for 
the ripe berries, if he has not already exhausted 
the crop by prematurely gathering it. He learns 
where to look for nuts and acorns, where the 
wintergreens grow, and he finds it convenient to 
make friendly visits to his neighbors during the 
watermelon or plum season. His interest in a 
tree is because of its fruits, because it is a favora- 
ble place to put up a swing, because it is so 
shaped that he can readily climb it, or perhaps 
because it has a mysterious hollow at its base 
into which he can poke countless objects. 1 His 
interest in topographical features of his environ- 
ment are with reference to his own activities. 
He likes to climb a high hill, partly because of 
the effort, partly because of the view afforded, 
and partly because he likes to run down it in sum- 
mer and slide down in the winter. The clouds 
are of interest in so far as they seem to represent 
processions of strange animals, and the beautiful 
colors of the sunset are interesting as suggesting 

1 1 remember distinctly how my sister and the group of girls to 
which she belonged kept me and my mates, about six years old, 
busied during the recesses at school for weeks gathering oak- 
balls, which they borrowed from us under the name of hens' eggs, 
and which we afterward found they had poked down such a hole 
as soon as they got them. 



IN ELEMENTARY ED UCA TION 1 1 3 

colors of imaginary dresses. To disregard these 
instinctive attitudes in dealing with such sub- 
jects in the school is to fail to appeal to the 
whole child. Without exception the interest of 
the child of this period in environment is with 
reference to his own activities, and this relation 
must be recognized in our courses of study and 
methods of teaching before we strike at the root 
of the question. 

With the use of free hands the child begins 
to show interest in construction, but his con- 
structions at this time are crude. In a general 
way, the child of this period corresponds to 
the stage of racial development in which 
acquisition of products from the natural re- 
sources was but meagerly supplemented by the 
more distinctly industrial processes. The larger 
co-ordinations are sufficiently developed to de- 
mand expression, but the development of the hand 
at this time does not warrant the use of many 
tools. The imperative demands of touch suggest 
that the first work in constructive lines should af- 
ford ample opportunity for the direct contact of 
the hands with the materials without the interven- 
tion of tools. Sand and clay are probably the best 
plastic materials for this period, but even clay is 
apt to make too large demands upon the fingers 
until the sixth year. 

It is a significant fact, when considered with 



1 1 4 THE FLA CE OF IND US TRIES 

reference to racial development, that the serious 
activities that may be used to advantage in the 
kindergarten, in contrast with those which are 
largely bound up with the make-believe element, 
nearly all cluster about the subject of food. 
Children in the kindergarten take delight in the 
care of plants ; they are interested in cooking 
simple foods ; and if their instinctive efforts, 
which are so apt to result in " mussing about " 
when left uncontrolled, are directed with refer- 
ence to present social conditions, habits may be 
grafted upon them at this time more easily than 
at later periods. The same is true of washing 
dishes, sweeping, dusting, arranging utensils in 
an orderly way, and other similar activities. 

Activities that are related to questions of 
clothing and shelter find expression in a more 
imaginary way. This seems to indicate that the 
child, as well as the race, takes a serious interest 
in the activities connected with food earlier than 
in those connected with shelter and clothing. The 
interest in shelter is best expressed by the child 
of this period by means of building-blocks which 
afford freedom of movement and quick results. 
The adaptation of a dry-goods box to the pur- 
pose of a doll's house is suitable for this period, 
and in its furnishings admits of a variety of 
activities. 

The wisdom of allowing the use of tools in 



IN ELEMENTARY ED UCA TION 1 1 5 

shaping wood at this time is a much disputed 
point. Where they are used the work seems to 
be justified by the joy that the child takes in the 
full, free movements that call into play the whole 
organism. The plane and saw, if adapted in 
weight and size to the powers of the child, afford 
greater freedom of movement than work in clay 
as ordinarily introduced. There seems to be little 
doubt that the use of hammer and nails should 
be postponed till the next period, especially since 
glue serves the purpose so much more readily 
and is more like the paste that most children 
are accustomed to use in connection with paper- 
cutting and cardboard construction. Here again 
the order of procedure is similar to that of the 
race, which used pitch, glue, and sinew for ages 
before nails of any kind were invented. 

The earliest manifestation of interest in cloth- 
ing seems to be associated with the self-exhibi- 
tive instinct. The child requires an opportunity 
to express himself in this way in order to de- 
velop normally. The fact that adults recount 
such early childhood experiences so seldom is 
partly accounted for by the fact that the instinct 
is one of the most permanent ones we possess. 
Doubtless all people can recount many experi- 
ences of this kind that they have never told to 
any one. Just as the savage enlarged his person- 
ality by the use of feathers and paint, so we all 



1 1 6 THE PLA CE OF IND USTRIES 

from our earliest years are more or less depend- 
ent upon similar means in order to realize our full 
personality. The effect of proper clothing and 
ornament upon the behavior of the child is very 
marked. 

Our own habits of dress represent activities so 
far beyond the child's power of execution that 
the most that he can do at this period, in this con- 
nection, is to illustrate the simpler processes. If 
the first crude attempts at weaving are with refer- 
ence to making a blanket for a doll's bed, there 
will be a motive for an otherwise aimless activity. 
If weaving is attempted it should be with coarse 
fibers, so as not to make too severe demands 
upon the activities of the child. Upon the whole 
it would seem that there should be but little work 
in the nature of weaving or sewing until the 
child is at least seven years old. It seems better 
to let the child's interest in clothing express 
itself in dressing and undressing dolls, in washing 
and possibly in ironing these articles of dress, in 
stringing beads, or in related activities that make 
little demand for precise co-ordinations. 

Up to the sixth year when the object begins to 
stand out more clearly in the child's mind, when 
the inner and the outer begin to differentiate, 
there is no distinction between work and play. 
To be sure there are differences in activities very 
early, but if not fettered by external conditions 



IN ELEMENTARY EDUCA TION 1 1 7 

the activity is equally free play, whether it 
serves the purpose of utility in the sense of 
the adult, whether it serves the purposes of play, 
as making a doll's house, or whether it is purely 
imaginary as in the case of dramatic play. It is 
important that the child get his full share of 
each variety of play and that its free character be 
maintained. 

One function of dramatic play is its freedom 
from all limitations. It is an expression of the 
child's active self. "Play," writes W. T. Harris, 
"undertakes to reproduce the external semblance 
of the fact without the causal chain that makes 
the essential element in it. The farmer mows 
with a steel scythe and cuts grass. The child 
mows with a wooden scythe and cuts no grass. 
He merely 'makes believe' to cut grass." 1 

While dramatic play is the most free of any of 
the varieties mentioned and is unsurpassed for 
purposes of enlarging the personality, it is fortu- 
nate that the child has at his command a form in 
direct contrast to it, which subjects him to certain 
wholesome limits. In a measure such play ac- 
tivities as playing with dolls, and making doll's 
houses, form an intermediate link between the 
dramatic play and the free play of work. The 
interaction of these different forms serves to se- 

1 W. T. Harris, "The Place of Geography in Elementary 
Schools," The Forum , Vol. XXXII, p. 539. 



1 1 8 THE PLACE OF INDUSTRIES 

cure a richer experience and a wider range of 
activities than could be obtained by the use of 
a more limited range. The chief value of the 
play of actual work of this period is that it 
serves as an easy transition to the later stage. 
When this truth is more fully realized and taken 
into account in education there will be fewer 
shocks as the child passes from one stage to 
another. 

What Mr. Mallery writes concerning the panto- 
mime of savages applies equally well to the child 
at this stage. "Pantomime acts movements, re- 
produces forms and positions, presents pictures, 
and manifests emotions with greater realization 
than any other mode of utterance." z The greater 
reality of this mode of expression is due to its 
dependence upon the muscular sense, which is the 
most deep-seated and generic of any of the 
senses, and the one by which the perceptions of 
sight and hearing have to be verified. It is by 
the use of this foundation sense that the child is 
best able to acquire images. So far as the child's 
pantomimes and dramatic plays are spontaneous, 
they have a real significance. It is the purpose 
of the school, however, to lay hold of these spon- 
taneous plays and freight them with a richer 
meaning. To allow them to remain in the purely 

Warrick Mallery, "Gesture Language," First Report of 
the Bureau of Ethnology, p. 281. 



IN ELEMENTARY ED UCA TION 1 1 9 

instinctive form is to forego the educational op- 
portunity. 

The instinctive expression indicates the type 
of activity for which the child is ripe. How 
much content the activity should have, how the 
child is to gain this content, are important ques- 
tions at this stage. In cases where the child 
dramatizes what he has previously performed in a 
real way, there is no need of attempting to fur- 
nish him with a fuller content except as occasion 
is taken to connect his personal experience with 
that of others. It does seem worth the while to 
enrich it in this way. It is one of the means of 
enlarging the self. In case the child is drama- 
tizing an industrial activity that he has observed 
it is easy to determine from his attitudes whether 
the activity has more significance than the stim- 
ulation afforded to the physical and emotional 
nature. If it has not there is need of teaching 
at this point. If the teaching can be by means 
of closer observation and conversation with the 
worker, so much the better; if this plan is not 
feasible the teaching may be by means of stories, 
pictures, and the clear presentation of conditions 
which the child is able to grasp. 

The child can be trained to more rhythmical 
action if he is stimulated by music which suggests 
the rhythm, but this use of music does not seem 
to be justified where the purpose is educational. 



1 20 THE PLA CE OF IND USTRIES 

The music may stimulate the blood so as to secure 
a corresponding rhythm in the movement of the 
muscles quite apart from any idea of the activity 
represented. It acts somewhat as a hypnotic 
suggestion. If the child is not able to dramatize 
an activity in a rhythmical manner without being 
stimulated and regulated by music supplied by an 
adult, it is not worth his while to do it. By this 
it is not meant that music has no place in the 
child's dramatic activities. It has. When an 
activity which at first was conscious has become 
automatic and is used for purposes of recreation^ 
music does not interfere with the purpose of the 
activity. Again, if the child spontaneously de- 
velops the music with the activity, it has a natu- 
ral place. The race parallel is suggestive here, 
but one must be careful to draw conclusions for 
the education of the young people in a demo- 
cratic society from the experience of free people 
and not from that of slaves. 

There are many records of the use of music as 
the means of sustaining and regulating the activity 
of free workers, but except in prolonged un- 
rhythmical activities which were accompanied by 
songs having no other relation to the work than 
that of relieving its tediousness, the music was 
the product of labor cries, commands, or the 
musical sounds of the work tools. It was devel- 
oped with the work and by the workers. In the 



IN ELEMENTARY ED UCA TION 1 2 1 

case of slave labor it was very different. Here the 
gang of workers took no part in the music. The 
music was in the hands of a band or a slave 
driver, and was used to stimulate and control 
the laborers. The use of music which we some- 
times make as a means of controlling activities 
of children in an external way is not the only 
instance in which we have failed to discriminate 
between the conditions of free and slave labor. 

The safest course in regard to the educational 
use of dramatic play seems to be to keep such 
activity in close connection with the occupations 
observed or participated in by the children. 
Should the teacher desire to make use of the 
occupations of less complex social conditions she 
will find it worth the while to introduce the pro- 
cess first with actual materials. It is important 
to distinguish between activities which require 
co-operative action and those that are the result 
of individual effort, but as this subject is treated 
in another place it may be left here without 
further notice. 

STAGE OF TRANSITION FROM INFANCY TO CHILD- 
HOOD. 

The eighth year is a period of transition from 
infancy to childhood. The world is not as ob- 
jective as it is a little later nor is it so purely sub- 
jective as in the preceding stage. This is pre- 



1 2 2 THE PLA CE OP IND USTRIES 

eminently the time for making the transition 
from play to the more serious activities of child- 
hood. If the emotional attitudes are not trans- 
formed during this period there is a serious loss 
in the vigor of life. The intellectual powers be- 
come stronger at this time. This change mani- 
fests itself in the interest the child takes in ad- 
justing means to ends, which becomes so strong 
that the child is able to conceive with clearness 
situations which previously had little significance 
for him. He is able to take more factors into 
account and to establish clearer relations between 
them. 

In the earlier period, the child's personal ex- 
perience is enriched by experiences of others in an 
environment quite similar, in most respects, to his 
own. Now he can take a more difficult step. 
His power to adjust means to an end in an orderly 
way suggests the possibility of his beginning to 
participate in the experience of the race through 
its successive steps in the conquest of nature and 
in the upbuilding of society. 

It would be possible to find types in contem- 
porary life of all but the lowest stages of culture, 
and it may be that such types may be used at 
this time with profit; but this is not the method 
here suggested. Partly because we are more in- 
terested in our own ancestry than in that of other 
people, partly because more cumulative results 



IN ELEMENTAR V ED UCA TION 1 2 3 

may be obtained by considering the evolution of 
one race than by getting more static conceptions 
of several different ones, partly because we are 
not so much concerned with the situation at a 
given stage of culture as we are in the method by 
which people advanced beyond it, the enrich- 
ment of the child's experience in this year is 
secured by the use of the experience of our own 
ancestors in the stages of savagery and barbarism. 
The strong contrasts in the social and natural 
environment to the child's own are sufficient to 
appeal to his love of the strange while the like- 
ness to his own is maintained, to a degree, in 
respect to climatic conditions and certain forms 
of plant and animal life, as well as in the similar- 
ity of race. The opportunities such materials 
afford for utilizing the emotional attitudes of the 
child in the service of an all-round growth are 
numerous. 

Although the subject of primitive industries is 
presented to the child with reference to the life of 
the people as a whole, and although the interest is 
in the people rather than in any particular activity 
or tool, there may be gradually accumulated, if 
the subject is well planned, a great many sequences 
illustrating the successive steps along particular 
lines. When the child has gained sufficient 
experience in the life of the people as a whole to 
form a rich background for differentiation, he 



124 THE PLACE OF INDUSTRIES 

may be encouraged in the act of freeing these 
sequences from their social setting, not in order 
to sever their connection with it, but to make 
this connection more vital. As particular se- 
quences thus become differentiated from the 
whole mass of experience, and as the child seeks 
a deeper meaning for each successive step than 
he may have realized when the subject first 
attracted his attention, he naturally sets up a 
return movement of thought to the mass from 
which the sequence was differentiated. In this 
way both the original mass and the particular 
sequence become clarified and enriched. Such 
activities serve not only as a means of affording 
the child the emotional satisfaction that comes 
with the use of a new power, but as a means of 
reviewing, of organizing the subject in a manner 
sufficiently definite to answer the needs of the 
child. 

The spontaneous hunting plays so character- 
istic of several years of child-life may be turned 
to profit at this time. They suggest not that the 
child is living or should live today the life of a 
hunter, but that his instinctive emotional atti- 
tudes are nearly the same. The more important 
difference is this : with the savage the response 
to the stimulus was a serious activity, with the 
child it is an idealized one. To be sure, a certain 
amount of the child's energy finds expression in 



IN ELEMENTARY ED UCA TION 1 2 5 

a real way, especially if he lives in the country, 
but much of it is expressed in some ideal form. 
Stories that portray contests of primitive people 
with wild beasts now extinct and the difficulties 
encountered in finding food and protection ap- 
peal to the ordinary child of this period much 
more forcibly than the ordinary events that take 
place in his own environment, and he craves for 
the stimulus that they afford. 

It is right here that the mistake may be made 
of simply gratifying the child's appetite by the 
use of stories. To do this would be to promote 
the separation between the objective and the sub- 
jective, that is beginning to be made. The pur- 
pose should rather be at this time to help the 
child to feel if not to know the essential unity. 
For this reason the story of the hunter should be 
related to the child's out-of-door plays in such a 
way as to lead him to exploit his natural environ- 
ment with reference to the needs of the ideal 
hunting clan in which he has become interested. 
His environment now takes on a new meaning. 
In imagination he now regards it as his one 
source of supply. Nuts, berries, and wild grasses, 
which have always interested him, now take on a 
fuller significance. Stones which heretofore have 
been selected chiefly on the basis of their color 
or luster now are chosen with reference to their 
adaptation to a need. For this reason the form 



1 26 THE PLA CE OF IND USTRIES 

is important ; for the nearer it is to the shape of 
the desired weapon or implement, the less 
trouble there will be in shaping it. But the prime 
consideration in selecting a stone for a cutting 
implement is to find one that will break with a 
sharp edge — that will not crumble under a blow. 

The child, like the savage, will not make this 
discovery in his first attempt to make a weapon ; 
and because the child's activity is an idealized 
reproduction of the real one he may be satisfied 
without making it at all. This is where he needs 
to be reinforced by the teacher. She may give 
the help needed by means of a story or by set- 
ting forth the needs of the primitive people more 
clearly. Unless in some way she helps the child 
to realize primitive needs and guides him in his 
efforts to utilize his own environment in supply- 
ing them, there is no educational value to the 
work. It is a question of i?idulging the instincts . 

The topography and the natural resources of the 
immediate environment when examined by the 
child with reference to their adaptation to the 
needs of a hunting, a fishing, a pastoral, an agricul- 
tural, a mining, or a trading people, take on a new 
meaning. The fact that so much of our territory 
has already been brought under cultivation makes 
it difficult for the child to get an adequate image 
of what it was under primitive conditions. Yet 
if such opportunities as are available in the 



IN ELEMENTARY ED UCA TION 1 2 7 

line of exploitation of environment are used, 
and if the experience thus gained is supplemented 
by the use of gesture, pictures, descriptions, 
drawings, and careful reconstructions of typical 
areas, so as to show not only the topography, 
but the character of the vegetation, the very diffi- 
culty, instead of offering a real obstacle, is a 
stimulus to self-activity in the realization of an 
idea. 

By utilizing the materials that are almost uni- 
versally available to those who are able to recog- 
nize them, the child, in the course of a year's 
work, can realize the special fitness of wooded 
hills near the river, and probably near its source, 
for the home of the hunter ; banks of the river 
and the shores of the sea for the home of the 
fisherman ; the uplands and open plains for the 
home of the shepherd ; the fertile river valleys 
and islands for the home of the farmer ; the moun- 
tainous places for the home of the miner and 
metal worker ; the harbor, the head of the tide 
water, the bend of the river, the fork, the fording 
place, the rapids or falls, the point of the inter- 
section of trails, the defiles, the mountain passes, 
or any other break in transportation for the cen- 
ter of the trader. He can realize why the hunt- 
ing, fishing, and pastoral peoples are compelled 
to lead a migratory life, and why the other forms 
of culture begin under a nomadic form ; he can 



1 2 8 THE PLA CE OF IND USTRIES 

understand better than before why habitations 
and their furnishings were of such a temporary 
character. 

When the child considers the causes of the 
migrations of animals he can realize the signifi- 
cance of the change of seasons in relation to the 
activities of the hunters. When he considers 
that man made friends with the grass-eating 
animals only after the most formidable of the 
beasts of prey had been exterminated, and that 
the grass-eating animals no longer had to supply 
food to so large a number of beasts of prey, he 
can see why the pastoral people could live on a 
smaller territory than the hunting people. He 
can see that agriculture, of which he found 
faint traces among the hunting, fishing, and 
pastoral people, could not develop until people 
acquired a settled mode of life. He can appre- 
ciate that there must have been strong forces 
operating to induce men to give up a mode of 
life to whi^h they were accustomed, a mode of 
life that afforded freedom from arduous toil, 
leisure to cultivate the arts, and the strong emo- 
tional excitement accompanying cattle-raids and 
other warlike enterprises. He can see that the 
weaker and less warlike tribes were forced 
to seek a place of refuge where they were 
obliged to depend upon the more systematic cul- 
tivation of plants, with which the women of their 



IN ELEMENTAL Y ED UCA TION 1 29 

tribes were already familiar ; and when people 
found that it was profitable to cultivate plants, 
they would be apt to spare the lives of captives in 
war and make slaves of them. He can see why 
people needed forethought in order to live by 
farming, and why so many tribes were obliged to 
go back to the hunting and fishing stages, or 
to become slaves of their more intelligent and 
stronger neighbors. 

In this time of conflict the child can readily 
understand how people living on the hills might 
defend themselves by means of hill or tree forts ; 
and how those in the valleys and plains might 
fortify themselves on the marshes, islands, pen- 
insulas, or lakes. He can see how these means 
of defense arose from the need of protecting the 
settled homes of agricultural people, or in the 
need of protecting valuable quarries or mines. 

If suitable material is in the hands of the 
teacher, she can easily lead the children to real- 
ize the close relation existing between the 
prevailing form of industry and the form of 
government as well as the form of the family. 
It is probably sufficient when dealing with these 
questions merely to make the proper groupings 
of facts, allowing the truth, which is held in 
solution, to precipitate in its own good time. 

The child's interest in metals and certain tools 
made of them and his intense curiosity in regard 



1 3 THE PLA CE OF IND US TRIES 

to such mysterious processes as those by which 
ores are reduced and metals manufactured, fur- 
nish the motive for activities by means of which 
he may master the rudiments of these arts. His 
own conjectures regarding the discovery of these 
processes may be supplemented by accounts de- 
rived from the practices of primitive tribes in 
many localities today. Such processes as mining, 
crushing, and reducing the ore ; building the fur- 
nace so as to utilize the wind for a draft, or 
inventing bellows by means of which the process 
may be kept under the control of man ; adapting 
the shape of the furnace to the particular situa- 
tion ; introducing fluxes to facilitate the smelt- 
ing ; shaping the metal by means of hammering 
or by using rude molds constructed for the pur- 
pose ; providing a means for the escape of gases 
from the molds ; discovering ways of using 
alloys ; taking suggestions from previous experi- 
ence in the art of cooking in outdoor ovens ; 
making such modifications as are demanded by 
the special needs of the time and place; and de- 
termining the significance of the art in the early 
stages of its development — all these processes 
can be brought within the easy comprehension 
of the child, if approached from the point of 
view of his own activities. 

The child's interest in presents, in the winnings 
in such games as marbles, and in the various 



IN ELEMENTAR Y ED UCA TION 1 3 1 

forms of barter which are so characteristic of 
child-life, form a natural approach to the earliest 
forms of trade. The survival of trading games 
shows that they meet a permanent want. The 
child of seven may deal with such questions as 
how trade originated ; why people in the earli- 
est stages depended entirely upon their own 
efforts in satisfying their needs ; how gradually 
it became customary for clansmen occupying 
special areas of culture to exchange presents 
with people of other areas on festive occasions ; 
why such presents were usually exchanged by 
the leaders of the clans ; how the desire to trade 
was fostered by this practice as well as by the 
necessities of pastoral and mining life, robbery, 
the spoils of war, tribute, fines, compensations 
and winnings in gaming ; how trade was retarded 
by hostile relations, and promoted by peace ; why 
market places were established upon neutral ter- 
ritories ; why wandering traders were allowed to 
pass through an enemy's country unmolested ; 
how the traders carried the news and thus in- 
creased the intelligence of the people ; how, as 
trade flourished, there arose the need of more 
exact modes of measurement ; and why perma- 
nent market places were established at breaks in 
transportation. 

The development of the subject of trade in- 
cludes the development of primitive travel and 



1 3 2 THE PLA CE OF IND USTRIES 

transportation on land and on water. The for- 
mer includes the study of the special costume 
and carrying devices of man as the human beast 
of burden ; the origin of trails, trading routes, 
roads, and bridges ; the first steps in engineering ; 
the domestication of animals and their use, first 
as pack animals and later for traction and for 
riding; the origin and simple steps in the develop- 
ment of the harness ; the evolution of the cart, 
and many activities subsidiary to these processes. 

The consideration of primitive travel and 
transportation by water includes an account of 
the various swimming devices and aids in float- 
ing; the substitution of the method of displace- 
ment for the method of flotation ; the develop- 
ment of the various forms of rafts, passenger 
and freight boats used in the periods of savagery 
and barbarism, as well as the methods of making 
and propelling the same ; and the means of regu- 
lating and sustaining the workers in the larger 
undertakings connected with this life. Many of 
these questions form a natural part of the sub- 
jects outlined above. When this subject is reached 
it will be well to gather up those experiences that 
are related to it and use them as the basis of the 
new work. 

When considered in relation to the periods 
between which it forms the transition, this stage 
is significant with reference to the tool. In later 



IN ELEMENTARY ED UCA TION 1 3 3 

infancy the dominating emotional attitudes and 
the formed co-ordinations unite in making it the 
period of the hand; in childhood the finer co- 
ordinations and emotional attitudes make equally 
strong demands for the tool. The child of seven 
is in an intermediate stage. The finer co-ordina- 
tions are beginning to be formed ; the child is 
not satisfied with his former activities, nor is he 
quite ready for the new. If the dramatic plays 
of the preceding years have been utilized to their 
full extent, and if the child has had the privilege 
of engaging in simple household activities, the 
transition may be made more easily than if he 
has been deprived of his full measure of these 
activities. 

In meeting the needs of this transitional period 
it should be borne in mind that as great an injury 
can be done to the child by giving him tools that 
represent a technique far beyond his capacity, as 
has frequently been done to lower races when 
put in possession of tools that represent an ad- 
vanced stage of culture. The harm is done to 
the savage by greatly increasing his leisure time 
without any corresponding change in his nature. 
He is relieved from a wholesome physical strain, 
that accompanies the use of the simple tool, with- 
out undergoing the many physical, intellectual, and 
moral strains that make the complex tool and 
its accompanying stage of culture a possibility. 



1 3 4 THE PLA CE OF IND US TRIES 

The result is, almost inevitably, idleness and 
vice. 

While the race parallel must not be applied 
literally to the case of the child, there is a truth 
in it which should influence the selection of tools 
that make up the child's equipment. In short, 
tools have a deeper significance than is usually 
attributed to them. There is more than an acci- 
dental correspondence between the character of 
the tool and the stage of development of the 
individual fitted to use it. In order to make 
it clear that the attitudes of this period may 
be utilized in making the transition from the 
epoch of the hand to that of the tool, let us con- 
sider them with reference to the conditions which 
gave rise to the origin and development of tools. 

Emerson in writing of man in the most primi- 
tive stage said, " His body was a chest of tools, 
but he had not the knack of using them." 
Writers on anthropological subjects frequently 
make allusions of this kind. 1 Just as primitive 
man learned to use the tools in his body in the 
early stages of his development, just as he made 
new physical co-ordinations that made possible 
more complex movements, so the child in the 

1 O. T. Mason, " Primitive Zootechny," American Anthro- 
pologist, New Series, Vol. I, p. 5 ; Edward Clodd, Story of 
Primitive Man, pp. 14, 15 ; Smithsonian Report U. S. National 
Museum-, 1894, p. 240; Iconographic Dictionary, Vol. VI, p. 
193. 



IN ELEMENTAR Y ED UCA TION 1 3 5 

period of later infancy by means of free play 
brings into action the various organs of his body 
and directs them to a multitude of purposes. At 
the time of making the transition it is especially 
fitting that his efforts be reinforced by kindred 
racial experience. 

No child of seven needs to be taught the uses 
of his arms, hands, feet, teeth, and nails. He 
has used them all numberless times and for 
various purposes. He knows very well how to 
strike with the fist, knee, or heel ; he knows how 
to carry burdens on his head, shoulders, back, 
knees, breast, and arms ; he can use his bent 
finger for a hook ; he can scoop with his hands ; 
he can rake with his fingers ; he can dig, scratch, 
and scrape with his finger-nails ; he can press 
and rub with his flat hand ; he can drink from 
the hollow of his hand ; he can tread with his 
feet; he can pierce, cut, grind, and grip with 
his teeth, and he can grip with the closed hand 
or hands, or the arm held closely to the body. 

On the basis of this universal experience and 
under the impulse of a need, the child can 
readily find in his environment the means of 
improving the tools in his body. He can find 
suggestions in " nature's workshop." He can 
find a stone which is harder than his fist and 
thus gain the use of a more efficient hammer as 
well as save his fist from the pain attending the 



1 3 6 THE PLA CE OF IND US TRIES 

hard blow ; if its rough edges hurt his hand he 
can wrap the end of it in grass or a bit of skin ; 
he can search till he finds a smooth hammer- 
stone ; if it slips and if its rebound jars his hand 
he can find relief by using a stone that has a pit 
on either side which will prevent the thumb and 
finger from slipping and at the same time pre- 
vent the jar. The child will be interested in 
comparing his own uses of hammers with those 
of primitive people. In following the life of the 
hunting clan he will realize that every savage 
needed a hammer and that he used it for many 
purposes. He can see that the women would 
need hammers to break dry wood for the fires, 
to crush the bones so as to get the marrow, to 
pound the dry meat into meal for pemmican 
when they were advanced far enough to practice 
drying meat, to drive down pegs for setting the 
tent, and for beating logs so as to loosen the 
annual layers which they wished to use in mak- 
ing baskets. He can see that the men would 
need hammers for driving wedges into the logs 
which they wished to split, for breaking stones 
in the quarry, for pecking or battering stones so 
as to shape them into rude implements, and for 
grinding paints, poisons, and other substances. 
These various uses will be appreciated only after 
studying the lives of primitive people for some 
months ; but by dealing with each situation as it 



IN ELEMENTARY ED UCA TION 1 3 7 

arises, so as to induce the child to explore his 
environment and to experiment with materials in 
the light of his own experience as well as in that 
of his knowledge of the conditions of the people 
under consideration, he gradually acquires a 
measuring unit for a more correct valuation of 
the social products of his own community. At 
the same time he is getting a proper respect for 
the people, who, under less favorable circum- 
stances than our own, laid the foundation upon 
which our civilization rests. 

As the child considers the fitness of the tool 
for the particular work under consideration he 
will see that, although one hammer may be used 
for a variety of purposes, there is need of ham- 
mers of different shapes and sizes in order to best 
accomplish each kind of work. In spite of the 
difference in shape and size, he will find that 
they are all alike in requiring a tough, compact, 
fine-grained stone. As he advances in the work 
he will discover that some kinds of hammering 
must be done rapidly, requiring little attention 
to the direction of the blow, while in other cases 
the blow is deliberate, the force and the direc- 
tion of the blow being measured with the great- 
est care. He cannot advance far in the use of 
the hammer without facing the problem of haft- 
ing, but since this topic is treated in another place 
it may be omitted here. 



1 3 8 THE PL A CE OF IND US TRIES 

Without going into further details it may be 
sufficient to note that the child can proceed from 
the use of his nails and teeth, as cutting imple- 
ments, to natural objects that are an improvement 
upon these. In view of the fact that most child- 
ren possess knives before they go to school, and 
have seen a variety of knives used for a variety 
of purposes throughout their short lives, it will 
be more difficult for them to realize a situation 
in which they must find something besides a knife 
to cut with than almost any other situation 
that may arise in connection with tools. Those 
who have tried the experiment, however, find 
that children enjoy situations of this kind ; and 
when they get the conditions of the problem 
clearly in mind they work perseveringly and with 
much originality in solving it. 

In the presence of knives and other implements 
made of metal, it would scarcely occur to a child 
to use a stone to cut with ; and deprived of these 
means, the use of stone will not be apt to be his first 
solution. He instinctively uses his nails and teeth 
for the purpose, and if he has the opportunity to 
see the teeth, tusks, and horns of animals he 
may get a suggestion from them. If he lives by 
the seaside he will doubtless think of using a 
shell, but it will not be long before he strikes 
upon the use of a sharp stone. While the child 
would not be satisfied to resign the use of his 



IN ELEMENTAR Y ED UCA TION I 3 9 

own knife for any length of time, he takes the 
satisfaction that he gets in play from experi- 
menting with various substances in order to find 
a material that he can shape so as to make a 
knife. If he stops short of the use he may fail 
to discriminate in the selection of material. If 
not, he can quickly learn the lesson that the sav- 
age learned long ago and thus get a practical 
lesson in mineralogy. 

When once the child has made a stone knife 
without a handle, it will be an interesting study 
to show how successive improvement may be 
made in it by varying the method by which the 
handle is attached. If hafted at the point with 
a short handle it is a hunting-knife, but if at the 
side, it becomes a woman's scaling, scraping, or cut- 
ting knife. The connection of the woman's knife 
with the kitchen mincing-knife on the one hand 
and with the saddler's round-knife on the other, 
will serve to illustrate to the children that al- 
though the material may change, the form and 
purpose of the knife remain almost the same as 
they were thousands of years ago. 

The evolution of the man's knife is even more 
interesting, and serves better to show the close 
dependence of the implement upon the general 
state of culture. Before man had any weapons 
it was not safe for him to meet the wild beasts 
in open combat. They were more powerful than 



140 THE PLACE OF INDUSTRIES 

he. When he saw the wild beasts he tried to 
escape from them. This was the age of fear. 
When he learned to make his first rude weapons 
he found that he could pierce and cut better with 
the stone knife than with his teeth and nails ; 
he could strike harder blows with a club or a 
hammer than he could with his heels or fists. 
Thus armed he got courage to meet the wild 
beasts in open combat. But it was not safe even 
then to come into close quarters with some of 
them ; so he lengthened the handle of his knife 
and thus supplemented his arms by the use of 
the spear. This was the age of combat. Gradu- 
ally man became so formidable that many of the 
wild beasts began to fear him. Now it was not 
man that was afraid ; he pursued the animals 
which fled in fear from his presence. This was 
the age of the chase. 

It is interesting to note the interactions be- 
tween the form of the weapon and the relation of 
the people to the animals. As the animals be- 
came more and more afraid, man was stimulated 
more and more to invent weapons that could fly 
faster than they could run. The heavy spear 
gave way to the dart and the javelin ; the throw- 
ing-stick was invented in order to increase the 
force and distance of the weapon hurled. Each 
invention served either to make such a change 
in the gripping device as to supplement the 



IN ELEMENTARY ED UCA TION 1 4 1 

strength of the ringers and arms, or to improve 
the character of the working part. 

Just how the bow and arrow was invented will 
probably never be known. The elements which 
it combines had been in use in different imple- 
ments for ages. The arrow is but a diffentiation 
from the primitive hunting-knife or spear. The 
elastic spring had long been in use in traps. 
One variety of throwing-stick made use of the 
bow, but in quite a different way. It is not the 
use of any one of the principles involved that is 
so remarkable, but the combination of principles 
by means of which man was able to co-ordinate 
mind and body in a most effective manner. The 
man who hit upon this combination was a genius 
of a high order. Mr. Wilson, in writing of the 
significance of the bow and arrow, says : "The 
bow and arrow was the greatest of all human 
inventions — greatest in that it marked man's 
first step in mechanics, greatest in adaptation of 
means to the end, and as an invented machine it 
manifested in the most practical and marked 
manner the intellectual and reasoning power of 
man and his superiority over the brute creation. 
It, more than any other weapon, demonstrated 
the triumph of man over the brute, recognizing the 
limitations of human physical capacity in contests 
with his enemies and the capture of his game." 1 

1 Thomas Wilson, "The Swastika," Smithsonian Report 
of the United States National Museum, 1894, p. 980. 



142 THE PLACE OF INDUSTRIES 

Little does the child realize when he plays 
with his bow and arrow what such a weapon sig- 
nified to the hunters of long ago. While it is 
not at all necessary for the child to formulate 
the facts, it is highly educative for him to get 
such interactions between his own experience with 
digging-sticks, spears, knives, javelins, throwing- 
sticks, elastic-springs, and bows and arrows on 
the one hand, and the conditions of life among 
primitive people who made use of these in the 
successive stages of their development on the 
other, as will enable him to appreciate the social 
need out of which each grew. He can readily 
grasp the idea that each advance, which was sig- 
nificant to the people of the time, was made either 
by making slight changes in the weapon already 
in use, or by combining in one form ideas for- 
merly used in different weapons or devices. 

Most children are already familiar with the 
bow and arrow, and before this subject is taken 
up in class they will have become familiar with 
spears, darts, and throwing-sticks. It will be 
interesting to examine a bow and arrow with ref- 
erence to the simple implements and weapons 
from which it was derived. For this purpose it 
is best to use a bow and arrow of the simplest 
type. The children can readily trace the evolu- 
tion of the arrow from the first crude hunting- 
knife and spear. The new idea seems to be the 



IN ELEMENTARY ED UCA TION 1 4 3 

bow, but even this is not new. The elastic-spring 
in the bow had been used in traps and in throw- 
ing-sticks. Children are very original in solving 
such problems, and their contributions to the 
process of tracing the development of primitive 
implements and weapons are not to be despised. 1 
The making of the bow and arrow presents the 
opportunity for acquiring valuable experience. 
First of all there is the proper selection of mate- 
rial. The child soon learns that any kind of a stick 
is not suited for a bow. Experience teaches him 
to select a branch that is both tough and elastic. 
If he does not know how long a piece to cut for 
the bow, after he has estimated the length, he 
may be told how the Indian hunters made the 
bow eight times the span from the thumb to the 
little finger of the hunter using it, and the arrow 
as long as the distance from the armpit to the 
end of the thumb-nail measured on the inside of 
the extended arm. This opens up the whole 
question of measurement and the selection of 
natural units. 

1 Frank Hamilton Cushing, " The Arrow," The American An- 
thropologist, Vol. VIII, p. 31 1. " When I was a boy less than ten 
years of age, my father's hired man/ while plowing one day, 
picked up and threw to me across the furrows a little blue flint 
arrow-point, saying : 'The Indians made that ; it is one of their 
arrow-heads.' I took it up fearfully, wonderingly, in my hands. 
It was small, cold, shining, and sharp — perfect in shape. Noth- 
ing had ever aroused my interest so much. That little arrow- 
point decided the purpose and calling of my whole life." 



144 THE PLACE OF INDUSTRIES 

The child may be satisfied for a time with the 
unwrought bow ; but as he discovers in his play 
that he can send the arrow to the mark better 
with some bows than with others, he will dis- 
cover the need of straightening the stick and 
removing the inequalities of surface. This need 
makes it all the more imperative that a good 
selection be made in the first place, and that it 
be made some time before the bow is needed, so 
as to afford sufficient time for the wood to be- 
come seasoned. How the savage straightened 
the stick with his fingers as he held it near the 
fire; how he steamed it in order to get it ready to 
bend and shape with his stone knife; how he 
scraped the rough edges ; how he rubbed the 
stick with reindeer fat to make it more elastic ; 
how he put it away to dry; how later he held it 
near the fire and rubbed it with bear's oil to make 
it tough ; how when the stick was ready he took 
the sinew that he had taken from the lower part of 
the leg of a reindeer and shredded it with his fin- 
gers until it was as fine as silk; how he spun it with 
the palm of his hand on his thigh; how he doubled 
and twisted the threads until he had cord large 
enough for a bow-string ; how he strung his bow, 
why he left it unstrung when not in use ; why he 
was careful to keep it dry; how he made a quiver 
and bow case ; how and why he rubbed his bow 
with oil — all these are subjects of intense inter- 



IN ELEMENTARY ED UCA TION 1 4 5 

est and value to the child. They are interesting 
because they appeal to his instincts ; they are 
valuable because they hold in solution ideas 
which underlie the science and industry of the 
present. They serve to make an easy transition 
between play and the more serious activities of 
life. 

How the shaft was straightened by drawing it 
through a groove in a soft stone, with or without 
the use of water and fire ; why the feather was 
split, and the unnecessary parts removed ; how it 
was carefully trimmed and laid upon the shaft 
to which it was attached by means of glue and 
sinew ; what the function of the feather was sup- 
posed to be and what it really was ; how the 
hunter made use of parts of his body for the 
bearings of the shaft when binding the arrow- 
head to it with sinew ; these, too, are subjects of 
interest and value. 

The child can readily see that in hunting with 
the simplest kind of an arrow it would be pos- 
sible for the wounded animal to free itself from 
the arrow and escape. This condition makes it 
necessary to think of some way of impeding the 
progress of the animal or of preventing the 
withdrawal of the arrow. The perception of this 
need is sufficient to give significance to the barbs 
upon the arrow-heads and to the detachable fore- 
shaft. 



146 THE PLACE OF INDUSTRIES 

Although the consideration of the methods of 
making bows and arrows in places where nature 
has withheld or concealed her gifts may well be 
postponed to a later year, it is mentioned here in 
order to show how fruitful in stimulating prob- 
lems the subject of the bow and arrow is. In dry 
countries where it is difficult to find much hard 
wood the hunters are obliged to invent devices 
for economizing the material. In this way the 
foreshaft is explained. It is made of hard wood 
because it is difficult to attach the arrow-head to 
a pithy twig. The heavy foreshaft makes a good 
socket for the arrow-head while the lighter wood 
serves very well for the remaining parts of the 
shaft. 

The making of the bow is not so simple. Yet 
the manipulation of the materials at hand so as to 
secure a bow that is sufficiently rigid and flexible 
has been effected in several ways, doubtless after 
unnumbered efforts. In some cases two or three 
horns are united, "the middle piece giving the 
columnar resistance, the wings putting the arrow 
to flight." 1 In other cases the effect is secured 
by using the white or sap wood of the cedar, 
which is not so brittle as the dry wood. It is 
removed from the tree so that the outside of the 
tree will also be the outside of the bow. After 

1 Mason, " The Influence of Environment upon Human In- 
dustries and Arts," Smithsonian Report, 1895, P- 662. 



IN ELEMENTAR Y ED UCA TION 1 4 7 

scraping, polishing, bending evenly, and carv- 
ing the ends so as to point back slightly, finely 
shredded deer's sinew is glued upon the back until 
it is a semi-cylindrical shape. By anointing it 
each day while it is drying with deer's marrow 
the brittleness is taken away. 

The problem of the Eskimo hunter is even 
more difficult. Mr. Mason has described how 
the difficulty is met in this case. " It is true that 
he has only brittle driftwood, that glue will not 
hold in his cold, damp clime, and that materials 
for arrows are scarce. The result of this is the 
sinew-backed bow and the harpoon-arrow, to- 
gether the most complicated and ingenious de- 
vice ever contrived by savage mind. The bow 
wood had one virtue, that of rigidity. By an 
ingenious wrapping of hundreds of feet of fine 
sinew thread or braid from end to end along the 
back with half hitches on the limbs, at every 
danger point the virtue of elasticity is added and 
you have one of the most quickly responsive 
implements in the world. The arrow is quite as 
cleverly conceived, for it pierces its victim, acts 
as a drag or log to impede its progress, and by 
its feather as a signal to the hunter in following 
his victim." 1 

When we consider the difficulties that primi- 
tive people had in making the bow and arrow, 

*IMd,p. 663. 



1 4 8 THE PL A CE OF IND US TRIES 

and when we take into account that in the use of 
it, it was necessary to consider distance, wind, 
varying elasticity of the bow, varying weight of 
the arrow, shape of the weapon, and the pene- 
trability of the game, and how each of these 
variables was rendered constant by the hunter 
skulking, getting to the windward, using wood 
of the greatest strength for bows, and manipulat- 
ing it to suit his needs, we cannot fail to see 
that its use was educative in the real sense of the 
word. The hunter who was armed with a bow 
and arrow could not act upon the basis of instinct 
alone — at every point it was necessary for intelli- 
gence to be used. 

It is equally possible today for the bow and 
arrow to exercise an educative influence for a brief 
period in the child's development. It can serve 
to refine his instinctive activities, to greatly in- 
crease his power to adapt himself to new con- 
ditions, and it can introduce him to history and 
science by means of such practical experience 
that he may, even in his early years, get an 
insight into the processes of man in relation to 
his environment that few attain until they have 
reached mature years. 

The child's interest in boats appears early and 
continues throughout the elementary-school pe- 
riod. The simpler steps in the evolution of boats, 
which were worked out during the periods of 



IN ELEMENTAR V ED UCA TION 1 49 

savagery and barbarism, may profitably be con- 
sidered by the child of seven, the more complex 
problems of early civilization being postponed 
until a later period. 

The child who lives near the water will have 
no difficulty in understanding why people learned 
to swim, and how they depended upon their own 
bodies in navigating before they learned to make 
and use boats. The play instincts may be util- 
ized with reference to the serious problems of 
life if the child be encouraged to work out the 
problems that confront one when learning to 
swim; to discover how the functions of the dif- 
ferent parts of the body in swimming suggest 
devices to facilitate the movement of the body 
and to give it more freedom; and to invent such 
devices as light wood, gourds, floating logs, 
inflated skins, and vessels of pottery as a means 
of support for the body or for a burden, which 
may be towed along by means of a cord attached 
to the person. 

The consideration of these humble origins is 
of value partly because it affords an opportunity 
for the child to experiment along a line that will 
yield cumulative results, thus meeting the grow- 
ing demand for a serial arrangement; and partly 
because it enables the child to grasp concepts 
represented by the technique in a vital way, 
thus enabling him to interpret more complex 



1 5 O THE PLA CE OF IND USTRIES 

forms that inevitably come into his environment 
later. 

The evolution of the wooden boat is a subject 
that presents many opportunities for utilizing ex- 
periences gained in hours of play. It includes 
such problems as the following: How people 
learned to reduce the friction of the swimming log 
by pointing the ends, and, after perceiving the 
advantage of logs hollowed through their former 
use as fireplaces, they began to manufacture rude 
dugouts; how these were paddled with the hands 
and feet until the happy thought occurred of ex- 
tending these limbs by artificial means; how these 
primitive paddles, resembling large ladles or pos- 
sibly shovels, were used to dig or to sweep up 
the water; what changes were gradually made in 
their form and in the manner of their use ; how 
in many cases the hollow log which was so nar- 
row as to cramp the body was widened by the 
use of hot stones, water, and braces ; how both 
height and width were increased by lashing 
planks to either side, thus increasing the stability 
of the boat at the same time; how as time went 
on the center log became smaller and smaller 
till it dwindled to a keel which still further 
increased the stability of the boat; how the side 
planks were increased until a framework with ver- 
tical ribs was added; and how gradually wooden 
pins were substituted for stitches, and later nails 
replaced the wooden pins. 



IN ELEMENTAR Y ED UCA TION 1 5 1 

The evolution of the raft is as full of interest. 
The floating logs brought down by the river in 
a time of flood offered a strong stimulus to primi- 
tive people to risk an adventure. The exhilara- 
tion of such a ride would stimulate them to efforts 
to make it a more permanent feature of their life. 
By lashing the logs together with strong cords 
the risk of a cold plunge was greatly lessened. 
Doubtless, at first, its course was determined en- 
tirely by means of the currents of water, but it does 
not serve man's purposes to leave the control of his 
affairs to outside forces. He discovers a way of 
regulating the movement of the raft by the use of 
long poles. The use to which the raft could be 
applied in travel and transportation operated so 
as to bring about further improvements. The 
clumsy raft gave place to a lighter one, and this 
to the catamaran — a raft of three logs or planks 
lashed together in five places, the central log 
being longer than the others in order to reduce 
the friction. As there was nothing to prevent 
the waves from washing over this vessel a plat- 
form was erected in order to keep the cargo dry. 

The catamaran developed into the double 
canoe on the one hand, and the outrigger on the 
other. The double canoe at first consisted of 
two logs laid parallel to each other some distance 
apart, united by cross-poles upon which a plat- 
form was reared. Later the logs were replaced 



1 5 2 THE PLA CE OF IND USTRIES 

by boats, the platform still being retained. The 
double canoe was an improvement upon the 
catamaran because it offered less resistance to 
the water. 

The outrigger, which is a small log attached 
by cross-poles to' the side of a boat, served to 
retain some of the advantages of the raft, and by 
lightening it, to secure at the same time some of 
the advantages of the boat. Sometimes outrig- 
gers were attached to both sides of the boat. 

The evolution of boats of bark, skin, and 
reeds, is equally interesting. How the best ma- 
terials at hand in the different areas of culture 
were utilized in the manufacture of water craft ; 
how these forms were gradually improved in 
order to secure safety and to economize strength ; 
how special adaptations were made in order to 
meet special needs ; why the paddle gave way to 
the oar and rudder, and these to paddle wheels 
and sails ; how man devised the shifting sail ; 
how he contrived meansof storing provisions for 
long voyages ; why voyages in the deep seas 
made it necessary for people to guide their 
course by the stars ; how sailing charts were 
invented ; how labor became organized by the 
needs of these undertakings — these are some of 
the problems with which the child may well deal 
in the study of the life of people who live by the 
sea. 



IN ELEMENTARY ED UCA TION 1 5 3 

Perhaps enough illustrations have already been 
given to show how fruitful the subject of primi- 
tive industries is in ideas which connect with the 
subjects of the school, and how many opportuni- 
ties it presents of connecting these interests with 
the play activities on the one hand, and the seri- 
ous activities of society on the other. With one 
more illustration for the purpose of showing 
more clearly how the mechanical principles, 
made use of in a practical way at this time, may 
be of service later in the interpretation of indus- 
try in the stage of national economy, this phase 
of the subject must be concluded. 

We have already seen how man found his first 
tools in his own body. He found the motive 
power with which to work them there too. Just 
as man's tools supplemented the organs of his 
body, so the different forces, which after long 
ages he discovered how to utilize, supplemented 
his own muscular energy, and were applied in 
ways marked out by the physical co-ordinations 
already established. The push, the pull, and the 
twist of human movements find their counterpart 
in the forces which we now find in machines. 

The mechanical principles which are involved 
in the most complex machinery are nearly all 
met with in a practical way in the study of primi- 
tive industries. The weight was made use of in 
the digging stick, the spindle, the hammer, and 



1 5 4 THE PLA CE OF IND USTRIES 

the trap ; the elastic spring was made use of in 
traps, in throwing-sticks, and in the bow and 
arrow ; the inclined plane was made use of in 
routes of travel, especially if there were burdens 
to be carried or vehicles to be drawn; the wedge 
was used in felling trees, in making planks, in 
tightening the lashing of haftings, and in num- 
berless other activities ; the lever was used in 
flaking stones, in carrying with several varieties 
of carrying-frames, and in rowing boats ; the 
sled was made use of on the grass, on snow, 
and on specially prepared tracks ; the roller was 
used in landing boats, and it preceded the use of 
the wheel in the evolution of carts ; the pulley was 
used in hauling up large animals from the sea, 
and in moving heavy weights either horizontally 
or vertically ; the wheel and axle, which we find 
in primitive carts, may have originated in the 
spindle-whorl, or in the fly-wheel used in drills 
for making fire, or drilling holes through stones ; 
twisting, shrinking, and clamping devices were 
made use of in the manufacture of implements ; 
the screw is found in its most primitive form in 
the device to stop the flow of blood from a wound 
by means of a wooden plug on which has been 
cut a sort of a "thread," and it was also used in 
tightening the back of bows and in several forms 
of traps. 

The child of seven is too immature to deal 



IN ELEMENTARY ED UCA TION 1 5 5 

with these mechanical devices as principles, and 
it is not at all necessary that he be taught their 
names. What is of importance, is that he be 
given the opportunity to originate these various 
ways of interchanging the time, direction, and 
momentum of the forces of his own body in the 
typical ways marked out by the savage — ways 
which Mr. Mason says that modern science and 
industry have been able to improve only by sub- 
stituting new materials and introducing improved 
methods of manipulation. 1 

PERIOD OF CHILDHOOD. 

In the treatment of this period we shall attempt 
at this time nothing further than a general state- 
ment of the attitudes of the period as a whole 
and the general character of the work along 
industrial lines, illustrating only where the situa- 
tion seems to require it. 

The most characteristic features of the first 
years of childhood are a retarded physical growth 
and a development of the co-ordinations that 
control the movements of the finer muscles. 
This is pre-eminently a motor period. The fact 
that new co-ordinations are ready for exercise 
and that less energy is demanded for external 
growth than in periods immediately preceding 

1 O. T. Mason, "Primitive Travel and Transportation," 
Smithsonian Report of the United States National Museum, 1894, 
p. 241. 



156 THE PLACE OF INDUSTRIES 

or following, suggests a reason for the restless- 
ness that is so characteristic of this age. The 
child is embarrassed by a store of energy over 
which he has not yet established control. He 
can maintain a quiet position only with the great- 
est difficulty. The objective world is now well 
differentiated from the subjective. The separa- 
tion between means and ends, which began in 
the earlier stage, is now more pronounced. He is 
able to grasp more complicated relations in the 
means than before. This manifests itself in the 
character of his games, which are no longer 
played for the interest in winning, although that 
interest is still strong. The games played at this 
time seem often to be played for the sake of 
acquiring skill. 1 The new co-ordinations are 
demanding an opportunity to function and offer 
a sufficient reward in the way of pleasure. 

This is the golden opportunity for teaching 
subjects that require considerable control of 
technique. The fact that the child's interest in 
technique is so great that at times he appears to 
take satisfaction in it when isolated from its 
vital relations, has led some to characterize this 
period as the age of drill. A more intimate 
acquaintance with real children is the best anti- 
dote for such a conception, which is largely 

z John Dewey, Mental Development, p. 13 (an unpublished 
article). 



IN ELEMENTAR Y ED UCA TION 1 5 7 

responsible for the attitude that many people 
take toward grade teachers. 

The differentiation between work and play, 
which began in the earlier period, is now more 
marked. The restlessness of the period is not 
occasioned by a lack of a serious interest in life. 
It is rather because the child has so many serious 
interests not recognized by older people. The 
lack of helpful recognition discourages many a 
child and demoralizes others. 

Because work and play stand out as separate 
interests, and because the child at this time is so 
serious, so objective, and so keen in interpreting 
a situation, the attempt to present work under 
the guise of play is readily understood by the 
child and valued accordingly. The separation 
between work and play at this period is not 
such as to prevent mutual interaction. Each can 
profit by its relation to the other. Just as 
in the earlier period all serious activities were 
conceived in the spirit of play, now play becomes 
freighted with the serious interests of life. To 
force this movement unduly is to arrest devel- 
opment, but to utilize it in the light of the child's 
changing interests is to foster the habit of con- 
ceiving work not as drudgery, but as a free and 
rich realization of the whole nature. 

The socializing and unifying function that 
belongs to play in the school-room during later 



1 5 8 THE PLA CE OF IND USTRIES 

infancy is now fulfilled by art, which is begin- 
ning to be differentiated from work and play. 
The degree to which art is able to exercise this 
influence is in proportion to the degree that the 
native instincts have become transformed into a 
great variety of habits that function with refer- 
ence to social life. If this change has been made 
during the earlier periods, art functions normally 
at this time. If, however, the attitudes have 
changed without at the same time becoming 
socialized, the serious activities are apt to be con- 
ceived as drudgery and emotional satisfaction 
sought in some anti-social form. The problem 
here is to restore the missing factor whose absence 
has caused such an isolation of interests. 

Fortunately the character of the child is not yet 
determined. He is still in the process of " be- 
coming." He is still responsive to suggestions — 
especially along the line of the native reactions 
of the period. 

The spontaneous activities, the traditional 
games which have had the vitality to survive, and 
even the activities of children which are interpre- 
ted as anti-social, 1 as well as many that really are 
such, unite in showing that during the period of 
childhood there is a vital interest in such prob- 

1 The case of a boy of nine, who stayed away from the formal 
work of the school two days without the knowledge of his par- 
ents in order to learn how to develop photographic plates, illus- 
trates how often children may be misunderstood. 



IN ELEMENTAR Y ED UCA TION 1 5 9 

lems as how man secured dominion over the 
natural forces, substituting for the motive power 
of his own muscles that of the beast, the water, 
the wind, fire, steam, and electricity; and how, 
in applying these forces successively to the work 
of society, he invented tools, discovered mechani- 
cal principles, worked out metrical apparatus, 
exploited his environment in search of natural 
forces, and invented and controlled machines 
for the more advantageous application of these 
forces. 

Where such work has been offered it has be- 
come evident that the opportunity to work out 
such problems by means of construction, illustra- 
tion, and experiment is the most natural way yet 
discovered of securing and maintaining a health- 
ful attitude toward the school. I have in mind 
the case of a boy in the fifth grade, who, after a 
change in the work which made room for the 
use of his own out-of-door experience, acquired 
such self-respect as to enable him to grapple 
with the formal work which previously had had 
no interest for him. The introduction of work 
of a more practical nature was what he needed 
in order to establish his relations with the work 
of the school. Another case of an eighth grade 
boy points in the same direction. He was so 
anti-social in his tendencies that he was about to 
be expelled from school. About this time his 



1 60 THE PL A CE OF IND US TRIES 

class, whose work had been of a more formal 
nature, began the study of the currents of the 
air by means of constructing fireplaces out of 
stone and mortar or any other material they 
might choose to provide. As long as work of 
this nature continued he was the earliest one at 
school in the morning and the latest at night. 
During this time he not only worked at his fire- 
place, experimenting with it so as to regulate the 
draft, but he searched through the available 
reference books for further light upon the sub- 
ject. As long as he had a problem that he 
could work out in a practical way he conducted 
himself in such a manner as to be agreeable to 
all with whom he had relations. In the same 
class there was a boy of an entirely different 
type, in short, he was the "model boy" of the 
school. While he did not stand in so great need 
of work of this character he was enthusiastic in 
working out his problems, and attained very satis- 
factory results. 

There are different degrees in which children 
of the same age are socialized. These differ- 
ences are often matters that the school can do 
little toward controlling. Work which calls out 
the emotional reactions normal at the time, which 
presents the opportunity of getting a clearly de- 
fined problem, which represents a technique 
within the possibility of the child's power to 



IN ELEMENTARY ED UCA TION 1 6 1 

master, and which is related to the achievements 
of the larger world in the consciousness of the 
child, is educative to all children of this period 
of development. 

It would seem, then, that art, which seemed to 
be the missing factor in the case of the anti- 
social child, may be restored by means of such 
appeals as are suggested above. Only gradually, 
however, does art become sufficiently strong to 
represent an independent activity. Real art is 
best promoted throughout childhood by securing 
and maintaining conditions that make it a quality 
of the whole life, rather than an independent 
activity. Since the activity of the child must 
be rooted in experience, the constructive activity 
must be vitally related to the content studies of 
the time. By the necessities of the case con- 
struction must lay tribute to both art and sci- 
ence. Under such circumstances it is frequently 
necessary to give considerable attention to the 
technical aspects of art, which, isolated from vital 
interests, would be a matter of indifference if not 
of dislike. When, however, the isolation is for 
the sake of acquiring the skill that is needed in 
order to continue a larger process that appeals to 
the child, he is persistent in his efforts until the 
end is accomplished. 

Most of the industrial processes of the child 
correspond to the stage of house industries. 



1 62 THE PLACE OF INDUSTRIES 

Although these date historically from the earliest 
human activities to the tenth century they still 
linger in communities where development is re- 
tarded, and they occur in some form in all com- 
munities. They fall naturally into two classes, of 
which the first represents each individual of the 
group as occupied in doing a variety of work, 
while the second represents several individuals 
engaged in one undertaking. The latter may be 
work where co-operation is used merely to facili- 
tate the work, or it may be work which would be 
impossible except by means of combined labor. 

When each individual supplies his own wants, 
when he manufactures what he needs, it is very 
evident that he has his own problems and that he 
regulates his own activities. When people begin 
to co-operate the question has a new element. 
If the labor is free labor, co-operation implies 
consent, and, although the work undertaken may 
not represent what appeals most strongly to all, 
yet the fact that they are co-operating implies 
that it appeals to all. The regulation of the 
labor comes from within the group. 

In early stages of society the regulation of 
labor was a serious problem, but the key to its 
solution came from the treasure house from which 
man's tools were derived — his own body. 
Rhythm, which is the key to all primitive regu- 
lation of labor, is organic. All accounts which 



IN ELEMENTARY EDUCATION 163 

we have of the lowest stages of culture show that 
all such people have some rhythmical form of 
regulating their labor. It is probable that the 
advantage of working in a common rhythm 
would soon be discovered. The common end 
and the possession of a similar nature would oper- 
ate so as to force this upon the attention. The 
primitive dance, which holds in solution both 
poetry and music, is an effort to secure co-opera- 
tive action. 

The regulation of free labor where the regula- 
tion comes from within, and where the labor is 
directed toward the accomplishment of a problem 
that appeals to all, is to be distinguished from 
slave labor in which the workers are regulated 
from without and are destitute of a problem 
that appeals to them. To state the difference 
ought to be sufficient to enable one to choose be- 
tween the two methods for educational purposes. 

No epoch of the past is of sufficient impor- 
tance to claim the entire attention of the child. 
His interest is primarily in the present. No use 
of the past which ignores this fundamental fact 
can be justified. Its justification must always be 
found in the nature of the child and in the social 
needs of the present. Processes which represent 
work done with simple tools without the aid of 
machinery will always be significant to the child. 
Cooking, sewing, and other forms of industry 



1 64 THE PLA CE OF IND USTRIES 

that may be carried on with the simplest tools 
are invaluable at this time. To confine indus- 
trial work in the school to belated forms of indus- 
try would be to deprive the child of his full 
heritage. Processes which have been superseded 
in the industrial world by more complex forms 
are as significant in education as processes which 
have not kept pace with the general advance. 
Processes which represent the co-operation of 
many individuals in great public works should 
find a place beside those which represent the sat- 
isfaction of individual needs. Activities that min- 
ister to the needs of the social group, whether it 
be the clan, the tribe, the village community, the 
manor, the city-state, or the nation, are more sig- 
nificant to the child, if approached through the 
medium of his own constructive activities, than 
those which minister merely to personal needs. 

The transition from barbarism to civilization, 
if approached through the medium of the child's 
constructive activities, is as fascinating to the 
child as to the university student who is able to 
carry on independent research. If the work is 
presented so that the child can get his own prob- 
lems and work them out in a concrete way he 
can early learn the value of co-operative effort, 
and, at the same time, get the basis for a clear, 
historical perspective. The child is interested in 
determining in what parts of the earth the earli- 



IN ELEMENTAR Y ED UCA TION 1 6 5 

est civilizations would be most likely to develop. 
He can easily be led to see that they first appeared 
in the fertile river valleys that were protected by 
natural barriers, and that the work of clearing 
the forests and draining the marshes and fens 
presented problems of such difficulty that they 
could be solved only by organized effort. When 
this fact is understood it is easy to see why the 
development of agriculture in the rich river val- 
leys was always paralleled by the growth of the 
city-state or by the development of a feudal sys- 
tem. 

The contrast which the conditions in an arid 
region present to the situation in the rich river 
valleys lends an added interest to a subject which 
represents a native interest of mankind. When 
the child has the opportunity to study the topog- 
raphy of the country in a graphic way he is as 
ready as anyone to suggest ways of changing 
the course of rivers, building reservoirs, digging 
ditches, and inventing countless devices which 
have been used since man first began to reclaim 
the desert regions. 

Phoenicia presents another interesting type that 
is appropriate to study in this connection. It is 
interesting to discover why commerce developed 
in Phoenicia, how it was carried on, what the sailors 
knew about the earth, what the routes of travel 
were, what the nature of their boats and cargoes, 



1 66 THE PLACE OF INDUSTRIES 

and the nature of other questions with which 
they had to deal. 

In connection with the study of the state of 
geographical knowledge at this time, the ques- 
tion naturally arises how people learned more of 
the world. This topic makes an easy transition 
to the subject of exploration, which is especially 
appropriate in intermediate grades. The child, 
as well as the adult, is interested in discovering 
how the exploration of each period has been 
affected by the knowledge and the inventions of 
the time, and how by currents of wind and water. 
He is equally interested in forecasting the effect 
of the explorations made upon the various peoples 
concerned, and in reading accounts of the same 
in books to test the soundness of his own judg- 
ment. His own experience along constructive 
lines will lead him to see that a period of explora- 
tion is apt to be followed by one of colonization. 
The practical problems connected with colonial 
life should be treated in such a way as to afford 
the child a breadth of view which includes a 
clear picture of conditions in the mother country. 
This serves as a necessary background for a sym- 
pathetic appreciation of the life of the people in 
pioneer conditions. 

There are many problems in primitive engi- 
neering, architecture, and mechanics that are 
especially adapted to intermediate grades. In 



IN ELEMENTARY ED UCA TION 1 67 

the study of the laying out and building of roads 
it will be interesting to trace our own routes of 
travel by land back to the animal trails. We are 
not accustomed to think of animals as engineers, 
yet Mr. Hornaday writes concerning the bison : 
"... the trail of a herd in search of water is 
usually as good a piece of engineering as could 
be executed by the best railway surveyor, and is 
governed by the same principles. It always fol- 
lows the level of the valley, swerves around the 
high points, and crosses the stream repeatedly in 
order to avoid climbing up from the level." x The 
history of the changes that have taken place in 
the trails of animals, the causes for the same, 
the improvements in the means of travel and 
their effect upon the relations among neighboring 
cities and states, the digging of tunnels, the con- 
struction of viaducts and bridges — all furnish 
problems of real value at this time. 

The child's interest in the public buildings of 
his own vicinity may be utilized by simpler prob- 
lems which are involved in the understanding 
of ancient public works. How the immense 
public buildings of antiquity were constructed ; 
how the character of the material affected the 
mode of construction ; how the materials were 

1 W. T. Hornaday, " The Extermination of the American 
Bison," Smithsonian Report of the United States National 
Museum, 1887, p. 417. 



1 68 THE PLACE OF INDUSTRIES 

tested ; how the principles of construction were 
discovered ; how rcofs were planned for the 
massive structures, and how these were related to 
the climate ; how the immense work was carried 
on by co-operative labor with the simplest tools 
and industrial appliances ; how systems of forti- 
fication were planned ; how heavy objects were 
transported ; in short, how the simplest begin- 
nings were made in the departments of hydraulic, 
bridge and road, sanitary, and mechanical en- 
gineering, is a subject worthy of the child's atten- 
tion and one that may be brought within the 
easy range of his understanding. 

Until our knowledge of education shall have 
become more scientific it will probably be best 
to leave considerable margin for optional work. 
There is need in this as in other work for guid- 
ance. The teacher's influence should operate 
to insure the selection of problems of sufficiently 
difficult technique to be stimulating, but not 
difficult enough to be discouraging. 

Perhaps the more important questions that 
cluster about the handicraft period are those 
bound up with such questions as the freeing of 
labor, the application of the power of the wind 
and water to simple machinery, the consequent 
change in manufactures, the development of 
commerce, the work of the Hanseatic league, 
the growth of cities during the Middle Ages, the 



IN ELEMENTARY ED UCA TION 1 69 

regulation of labor by means of guilds, the advance 
made in more accurate measurement, the artistic 
work of the craftsmen, and the spirit which gave 
rise to the cathedrals. These subjects lend 
themselves to various forms of expression and 
serve to enrich many experiences of the child. 
The handicraft period finds its counterpart in the 
child, not in such a differentiation of labor as will 
make him master of a craft, but in a differentia- 
tion of interests which previously were bound up 
in a more undifferentiated form. His practical 
activities in connection with such materials are 
for psychological and educational rather than for 
economical ends. 

No better means are available for assisting the 
child to understand the complex industrial 
organization of the present than to give him an 
experience in some of the more fundamental 
processes. The very fact that he has produced 
raw material, and that later he manufactured and 
used it, affords him an experience in a whole 
round of activities, which enables him to place 
any isolated activity in relation to the whole 
system of which it is a part. In some cases it 
may be found convenient for some members of a 
class to prepare the material for others to manu- 
facture. This division of labor is a type of what 
is going on in the larger world. Some children 
will excel in one line of work, some in another. 



1 70 THE PLA CE OF IND US TRIES 

The recognition of this fact is significant with 
regard to understanding the reason for specializa- 
tion in industrial activities. 

If such problems as those suggested in the 
preceding pages be taken up in the elementary 
school, the way is prepared for a profitable study 
of the main steps in the industrial revolution in 
England and the United States during the last 
year of the course. This study affords an 
admirable opportunity for summing up the results 
of the previous years' work and of more con- 
sciously recognizing inter-relations among the 
various forces involved. These inter-relations 
are felt in earlier years; they are recognized 
practically, and in some cases they are formu- 
lated ; but at this time there is a more distinct 
place for formulation. This change corresponds 
to the larger place that intellectual interests now 
take in the life of the child in contrast to the 
purely practical. But even now, care should be 
taken not to force intellectual activity unduly. 

The child, who has traced the tool from the 
action of his own body through the various stages 
of its development, has felt, as he has wielded it, 
the rhythmic movements of economical adjust- 
ments. He is now prepared to see how the 
mechanical principles with which he became 
familiar in the study of primitive life are utilized 
by means of better appliances ; and how their 



IN ELEMENTARY EDUCATION 171 

action, which has been rendered rhythmical 
and hence automatic, may be handed over 
to a machine. What this machine is, what its 
purpose, how constructed, how controlled, and 
how used for the amelioration of society, these 
are the problems that the school should under- 
take to teach him to grapple with, rather than 
to occupy him with activities that tend to render 
him as automatic, as unfeeling, as a part of the 
machine itself. 

The construction of simple machines in the 
workshop, and the tracing of the connections 
between the steps in the process from the stage 
of the hand, through the stage of the tool, to that 
of the machine, with its many possible modifica- 
tions, is an educative work. It will train the child 
to control machinery rather than be controlled 
by it. It will help to advance the movement 
most necessary at present in order to facilitate 
the adjustment of labor questions. 

The present difficulty consists largely in the 
fact that the industrial processes have been 
improved without a corresponding development 
in the lives of the workers. As long as the 
worker could get the reflex effect of his own 
work, his occupation was an expression of his 
own desires. Now that the process is so com- 
plicated it is difficult for the worker to realize 
that he has a problem or that he has any con- 



1 72 THE PLA CE OF IND USTRIES 

trol over his own activities, He is in need of 
an intelligence trained to recognize the various 
stages of the work and his relation to the whole; 
he is in need of sympathies broad enough to take 
in, at least in so far as the relations of his acts to 
them are concerned, all those who are to use the 
product of his labor. Under such conditions 
manufacturers will not be obliged to make use of 
inferior machinery in order to supply labor of an 
unskilled sort. To promote the realization of an 
ideal which shall secure this high type of human- 
ity is certainly a worthy object of education. 



CHAPTER V. 

CONCLUSION. 

" The more things thou learnest to know and to enjoy 
the more complete and full will be for thee the delight of 
living." — Phlalen. 

A complete consideration of the place of in- 
dustries in elementary education would require a 
work of several large volumes. This is merely a 
preliminary survey of the field for the purpose of 
getting such a perspective as is necessary in order 
to evaluate the industrial activities of any age, 
and to discover the underlying principles which 
determine the practical application of the ma- 
terials considered. The applications presented in 
the preceding chapter are suggestive only. A 
more detailed application is presented in another 
place. 1 

In the first chapter we set out with certain 
fundamental problems. In the succeeding chap- 
ters we reviewed various phases of social experi- 
ence with reference to those problems. In the 
preceding chapter we have suggested some prac- 
tical applications. At this time let us make a 
brief summary of the more important results of 
the work. 

1 "Industrial and Social History Series," Rand, McNally&Co. 
173 



1 74 THE PLA CE OF IND USTRIES 

In reviewing the more important industrial 
epochs we have found that in each there is a 
close relation between the dominant industry of 
the period and the natural and social environ- 
ment of the people. Each dominant form of 
industry is conditioned by its environment and, 
in turn, conditions all other forms of activity. A 
change introduced into any part of an industrial 
process affects not merely the entire process, 
but its influence permeates every department of 
life. 

The introduction of a new motive power 
means, on the one hand, the introduction of a 
new means of applying that power, and, on the 
other, a new form for the organization of labor. 
An advance in the use of a new material is 
attended by similar changes. Whether the 
advance be in the form of the use of a new 
material, the conquest of a new force, or in the 
more economical application of the same, it inev- 
itably reacts upon the lives of the workers so as 
to develop a different quality of life, a different 
mode of interpreting phenomena. 

The type of man's emotional reactions was 
fixed by the conditions of life in a dangerous 
situation, but his attitudes have been modified, 
under the influence of social approval, by the 
activities of succeeding ages. Throughout long 
periods all activities were dominated by the con- 



IN ELEMENTAR Y ED UCA TION 1 7 5 

ditions attending the fierce struggle for exist- 
ence, the very difficulty of the struggle making 
it necessary for the individual to accumulate 
energy sufficient not only for the ordinary affairs 
of life, but for the emergencies as well. It is due to 
this fact that man accumulated surplus energy, 
which, when not needed in the serious activities 
of life, was expended in some form of art or play. 
In expressions of playful activity the formed 
physical co-ordinations and emotional attitudes 
united in favoring a discharge along lines marked 
out by the serious activities of life. 

Under the influence of personal need and 
social approval man gradually learned to refrain 
more and more from purely instinctive action and 
to secure, through the exercise of associative 
memory, more indirect and economical modes of 
response. The advantage of such acts, once 
being perceived, was made subject to more con- 
scious control. The increasing complexity of 
the situation was thus paralleled by an increasing 
complexity in man's response. Life became 
more complex. The problem, which at first was 
plain and direct, became more and more obscure. 
The emotional reactions were lost, and it became 
necessary to rely upon artificial means of sus- 
taining activity. 

In the earlier periods labor was the part of all 
and was attended by strong feelings of pleasure 



1 76 THE PLA CE OF IND USTRIES . 

that always accompany the normal exercise of 
the workmanship instinct. In the barbarian 
stage of culture a division of labor was made 
which assigned the less intellectual occupa- 
tions to slaves. The associations thus made re- 
sulted in a disdain for labor which characterized 
the leisure class of that period. Later, in the 
ancient civilizations of the city-states, religion 
placed such restrictions upon labor as to lend its 
sanction to regard as wrong what had previously 
been regarded merely as ignoble. These restric- 
tions deprived the leisure class of the pleasure 
attending the normal exercise of the workman- 
ship instinct, and the laboring class of the condi- 
tions essential to securing attention and the 
normal action of the necessary reflexes. The 
emotional reactions were thus lost, and labor be- 
came irksome. 

The changes resulting from the organization of 
labor under the handicraft system were such as to 
separate the entire process into so many lesser 
activities as to obscure, in the minds of the 
workers, the complete view of the situation. 
Later, when wind and water power were substituted 
for human and animal power, and, finally, when 
the almost universal use of steam transformed 
the entire industrial organization, the minute 
division of labor made necessary by the change 
still further obscured the view of the process as 



IN ELEMENTARY EDUCA TION 1 77 

a whole. Owing to the rapidity of the change 
wrought by the use of steam, and on account of 
the fact that under this system it is possible to 
utilize a great amount of unskilled labor, no ade- 
quate provision has been made for such an edu- 
cation of the mass of workers as is necessary in 
order to preserve the balance between the tech- 
nique of the entire process and the intellectual 
and moral character of all classes of workers. 

How the simple forms of industry have affected 
the development of the arts and sciences ; how 
the gesture language of the pantomimic dance, 
which was closely related to practical activities, 
developed into dramatic poetry ; how, later, it 
took the form of the festival and only gradually 
became free from the serious activities of life; 
how epic poetry was first bound up with such 
activities; how, as people became more conscious 
of the significance of their acts, the heroic song 
arose, which, first sung by the people, finally was 
sung by a professional singer ; how, finally, it 
made itself free from music ; how the freeing of 
epic, lyric, and dramatic poetry succeeded each 
other in obedience to laws similar to those which 
govern the freeing of architecture, sculpture, and 
painting ; in short, how the typical steps in the 
evolution of the various arts and sciences have 
been taken, are problems which we have been 
obliged to pass with little notice. 



1 7 8 THE PL A CE OF IND USTRIES 

With regard to the child, we have noticed the 
correspondence between his psychical attitudes 
and the ancient activities that underlie our indus- 
trial processes. These attitudes persist in the 
child, not as serious activities, but as idealized or 
dramatic representations of the same. In many- 
cases they appear as reductions of the original 
activity which have become incorporated into 
later formed co-ordinations. 

It is the function of education to lay hold of 
these native reactions and to graft upon them 
habits related to the society in which we live. 
In later infancy play is the prime agency by 
means of which the native reactions may be- 
come transformed into a multitude of co-ordina- 
tions ; in childhood play is supplemented and 
gradually superseded by the constructive activity, 
which begins to manifest itself in the period of 
infancy. For several years construction holds 
the sciences and arts within itself; but, gradu- 
ally, they become more and more free. 

The natural demand of the mind in all stages 
of its development for the completion of a situa- 
tion requires that an opportunity be presented 
for the exercise of the instinct to exploit the 
environment in the search of raw materials, the 
exercise of the workmanship instinct in the pro- 
cess of manufacturing the same, and the exercise 
of the social instinct in the consumption or use 



IN ELEMENTAR Y ED UCA TION 1 79 

of the articles produced. In fact, the social 
instinct affects each step in the process. The 
desire to enhance one's personality under the 
stimulus of social approval operates to form 
habits of industry which condition all higher 
forms of activity. 

The process of socializing the instinctive ac- 
tivities of the child is greatly facilitated by 
the use of racial experiences. Collective in- 
dustries are of value in this connection, for in 
such activities the individual for the time loses 
himself in the consciousness of the group. The 
representation of great public works, which may 
lie beyond the limits of sense perception, stimu- 
lates the imagination, widens the sympathies, 
and establishes a feeling of kinship with a larger 
world. 

We have seen that the instincts and attitudes 
that underlie industry are those that underlie 
the sciences and the arts. They are the common 
heritage of mankind. If conditions are such 
that they can find opportunity for normal expres- 
sion they afford pleasure to the individual and, 
at the same time, serve as useful instruments of 
social service. If denied a normal expression in 
keeping with the stage of development of the 
individual and the society in which he lives, they 
are apt to suffer atrophy through disuse, or to be 
diverted into anti-social forms. In either case 



180 THE PLACE OF INDUSTRIES 

the individual is deprived of the joy that attends 
the normal exercise of his full powers, and so- 
ciety is deprived of his legitimate service. 

Society can no longer afford to suffer such 
loss as attends this neglect. It is the part of 
educators to sift the experiences of the past, so 
as to preserve that experience which is helpful 
and to reject that which tends toward the loss 
of any part of the full heritage of each child. It 
is only too evident that there has been a ten- 
dency in the school to neglect the development of 
the normal attitudes of the child and to cultivate 
abnormal ones by imposing the formulated results 
of a highly organized system upon the child, who 
is not yet able to assimilate such material. Edu- 
cation is beginning to be established upon a 
firmer basis, however, and we may hope for more 
rational methods in the near future. 

It is not too much to expect that the marvel- 
ous change wrought in the industrial world by 
the application of modern science to industrial 
processes will be paralleled by as remarkable an 
advance in education. It was natural and right 
that science, whose roots strike deep into the in- 
dustries of the past, should, on becoming free to 
express itself on its own account, return with its 
first fruits to the parent stock from which it 
sprang. In this way it has laid a broad founda- 
tion for its own further development; it has 



IN ELEMENT AR Y ED UCA TION 1 8 1 

created a demand for that which it alone can 
give, and, at the same time, it has suggested the 
possibility of a similar application to new fields. 
As yet we are only beginning to know the 
child. We have become well enough acquainted 
with him to realize that there is an enormous 
waste in current educational methods, but com- 
paratively little has yet been done to utilize this 
waste. We must call science to our aid if we 
would make an economical adjustment of the 
motive power in education to the work to be done. 
We must study the child in his environment. 
Dr. Loeb 1 has demonstrated with lower forms of 
life how instincts may be changed by changing 
the temperature, light, or other external condi- 
tions. Our own experience in regard to the 
change in attitude that accompanies a change in 
our natural or social environment indicates that 
the truth to which Dr. Loeb has called attention 
is not confined to the lower orders of life. It 
ought to be possible to make such a study of 
child-life under various conditions as to deter- 
mine in a much more minute way than that here 
outlined, and with scientific accurac}?-, the normal 
attitudes of each stage of development, as well as 
the conditions best adapted to secure and main- 
tain them. 

This work can best be accomplished by the 
1 Jacques Loeb, The Physiology of the Brain, pp. 198, 199. 



1 8 2 THE PLA CE OF IND US TRIES 

departments of education in our great universi- 
ties in co-operation with the departments of those 
sciences that are tributary to the same. The 
fear that something will be lost in life if it is sub- 
jected to an interpretation through the media of 
physical and chemical laws is no better grounded 
than the fear that the Bible will suffer when sub- 
jected to the search-light of the higher criticism. 
That which is true and that which is holy cannot 
suffer by being subjected to the most rigorous 
tests. Such processes, by means of separating 
the transient from the permanent factors, the 
non-essential from the essential, serve to illumi- 
nate the truth so as to greatly multiply its power. 
The various search-lights of truth sent out by the 
different departments of science cannot fail to 
disclose facts which will serve to mutually check 
or reinforce one another. 

From the practical workers in the elementary 
schools we may expect valuable contributions. 
By the very nature of their duties they cannot 
take the attitude of the investigator. Synthesis 
rather than analysis, art rather than science, gives 
color to their work. It would be a mistake to 
destroy this attitude by requiring attention to 
new questions that make such a demand upon 
the analytic habit of mind as to interfere with the 
synthetic. If, however, such a training 1 has pre- 

1 It is to the Normal Schools that we must look for this training. 



IN ELEMENTARY ED UCA TION 1 8 3 

ceded the practical work as will enable one to 
duly subordinate analysis to synthesis, results of 
real value may be expected from such sources. 
There is need of co-operation here as elsewhere 
in order to secure the best results. The best 
results of co-operation between those who are 
engaged largely in the work of investigation and 
those who are occupied chiefly with the practical 
work will come when the latter are free to follow 
interests which have a direct relation to their 
own practical problems. In many cases the 
results of the experience of the practical workers 
will be best gained by means of informal confer- 
ences between them and the scientific investi- 
gator. In other cases more systematic work may 
be carried on by the practical worker in co-oper- 
ation with the investigator. Parents and teachers, 
better than any other people, can know the spon- 
taneous activities of the child. They can deter- 
mine the attitude of the child toward various 
activities and toward the various tools and 
materials with which he comes in contact. The 
physician can determine better than any other 
the physical conditions. The scientific investi- 
gator can supplement this knowledge by the 
results of various experimental tests and can 
correlate the available results of all methods 
used. 

The work of furnishing nutritious materials for 



1 84 THE PLA CE OF IND USTRIES 

an all-round growth of mind in the successive 
stages of development is not an unimportant 
one. While it is true that if there were less 
pressure from above regarding the question of 
the acquisition of certain formulated results of 
civilization, the teacher and children would 
occupy themselves with more vital questions 
than many of those to which much attention is 
now given, we can expect no really cumulative 
results until the materials of instruction are or- 
ganized more definitely with reference to the atti- 
tudes of the child. This fact should be recog- 
nized by the makers of our text-books. Much 
of what is vital to the child now remains stored 
away in the dusty alcoves of our great libraries. 1 
Few but specialists make use of these materials ; 
and, hitherto, little effort has been made to make 
any use of them with reference to the needs of 
children. There is need of laying hold of these 
rich stores of experience and of organizing them in 
such a way as to render them available for gen- 
eral use. There is need of incorporating in 
text-books for children such a presentation of 
the problems of racial life as corresponds to the 
child's own attitudes. There is need of present- 
ing these materials in such a way as to enable 
the child to take the initiative in determining his 

1 This does not imply that there is not much valuable material 
for the child in the practical life of the present. 



IN ELEMENTARY ED UCA TION 1 8 5 

problems and methods of work. In addition to 
this the text-book should present typical racial 
experiences that afford an opportunity for the 
child to grasp a broader significance of his own 
acts. In the earlier stages, before differentiation 
of interests becomes strong, such materials rep- 
resent literature, history, science, arithmetic, 
reading, language, construction, art, and play — 
all in one. As the child's interests begin to differ- 
entiate there is a need of a corresponding differ- 
entiation in subject-matter. 

Arithmetic, which at first is merely one phase 
of experience, comes more nearly to represent 
an interest in itself; but for a long time it should 
not be divorced from the content of life which 
gave rise to it. It is true that arithmetic has a 
content of its own, but it is also true that not until 
the elementary period of education is passed 
does this content appeal to the ordinary child in 
such a way as to make the experience gained by 
such an isolated activity of any great educational 
significance. Till such a stage is reached the 
text-books used should be of such a scope as to 
include the subject-matter out of which problems 
of the various types arose. It may well be left 
to the text-book in industrial history to furnish a 
more complete account of such situations ; enough 
should be included in the text in arithmetic to 
insure an easy connection between the technique 



1 86 THE PLACE OF INDUSTRIES 

of the problem and the experience of which it is 
but a phase. Only when presented in relation to 
the industrial activities of which it is a phase is 
there an excuse for the introduction of an obso- 
lete method of commercial transaction in our 
text-books in arithmetic ; only when in such re- 
lations is it possible for it to become an experi- 
ence of value to the child. When introduced in 
such connections, when its function as an instru- 
ment of life under certain conditions is evident, 
its introduction into the course of study is justi- 
fied on the same ground as the introduction of 
an obsolete industrial process. 

That which is vital in the past lives on through- 
out all time, but its function appears to change. 
That which ministers to the physical needs of 
one age is significant with reference to the intel- 
lectual and spiritual needs of succeeding ages. 
This should not be construed to mean that that 
which ministers to physical needs is not capable 
of ministering to the higher needs at the same 
time. It is. The fact that the satisfaction of 
material needs occupies so large a field of con- 
sciousness tends to obscure other results of the 
industrial process. Obsolete processes are more 
significant in the education of the child than 
modern ones, not because they are obsolete, but 
because they represent a technique more nearly 
adapted to the ability of the child. A conscious 



IN ELEMENTAR V ED UCA TION 1 8 7 

recognition of the values that are implicit in in- 
dustrial processes will do much to multiply their 
power. What the simple obsolete processes are 
to the child, modern complicated ones should be 
to each and every worker who participates in the 
process. 

On this ground the place of the industrial ac- 
tivities of the past in education is limited only 
by our ability to appropriate these activities to 
higher purposes. To pave the way to a more 
easy appropriation of such resources and agen- 
cies in the cause of education is an ideal of such 
potency as to transform the prolonged work 
necessary to the realization of even a small por- 
tion of the field into the character of play. 

What is true of arithmetic is also true of sci- 
ence, art, manual training, 1 and, in short, of each 
subject of study that has a legitimate place in 
elementary education. It must not be forgotten 
that this entire period is pre-eminently an expe- 
rience stage. The success of the later differ- 
entiated activities depends largely upon the 
maintenance of such conditions as will insure a 
full use of the activities characteristic of the suc- 
cessive stages. Only when such conditions are 

x In this connection the reader maybe interested in "The 
Place of Manual Training in the Elementary School," by John 
Dewey, Manual Training Magazine, Vol.11, p. 193, and " The 
Thought Side of Manual Training," by Arthur W. Richards, 
Ibid., Vol. Ill, p. 61. 



1 88 THE PLACE OF INDUSTRIES 

secured is it possible to transform and preserve 
the emotional attitudes, which are significant in 
some form throughout life. Only under such 
conditions is it possible for the child to acquire 
a broad, rich, and vital experience sufficiently 
deep-rooted to furnish the impulse to the many- 
sided interests of maturer years. 

The fact that so little attention has been given 
in this place to the selection of simple activities 
from modern life for purposes of education, 
should not be interpreted as a failure to recog- 
nize their educative value. There need be no 
conflict between that idea and the one here em- 
phasized. Emphasis is placed upon the evolu- 
tionary aspect, because it is believed that we can 
know what we are only by knowing what we 
have been. It is because this method reveals 
the principle of growth so clearly that even the 
child can appreciate it, that it deserves the place 
in education which we have assigned to it. As 
this principle comes to stand out more and more 
clearly, and as the materials for the enrichment 
of the child's activities are sought from parallel 
phases in contemporary life, as well as in the 
past, there is introduced into what otherwise 
might be a mass of confused ideas regarding the 
condition of contemporary life a principle of or- 
der, by means of which it is possible to place the 
various peoples with reference to the forces 



IN ELEMENTARY ED UCA TION 1 89 

that have been potent in determining their stage 
of culture. 

The objection sometimes urged that it is diffi- 
cult for the child to picture conditions far removed 
in space and time has no foundation. When we 
pass beyond the limits of sense perception, it 
makes no difference to the child, for several 
years, from what age the subject is drawn, pro- 
vided that it represent an experience of a type 
similar to his own emotional attitudes. Not until 
the transition from infancy to childhood has been 
made, are space and time important factors in 
determining the source from which the materi- 
als for the enrichment of the child's experience 
should be drawn. At that time his attitude 
toward the objective world is such as to make 
them more important factors ; but at no time 
during the elementary-school period does inter- 
est in space and time assume such importance 
as to nullify the principle that finds recognition 
in the presentation of such problems and materi- 
als as satisfy the spontaneous activities of the 
period. 

Practical activity which is an expression of the 
child's interests and capacities, socialized by 
racial experience, is not only the best means, 
but the only means thus far discovered by 
which the child can organize the subject-matter 
of education. It finds its justification in the race 



190 THE PLACE OF INDUSTRIES 

parallel, in the fact that it is the way the child 
learns before he comes to school, the way he can 
lay the best basis for the later activities of life, 
and the way he will continue to learn after the 
walls of the schoolroom are left behind. It is a 
superficial treatment of the question which gives 
the impression that it is a radical departure in 
education. A closer examination reveals the fact 
that it is much more conservative than methods 
in common use. They represent the radical de- 
parture from the path marked out by human 
experience. This method would conserve what 
is best in the past ; it would build upon it ; it 
would lay hold of our social inheritance in such 
a way as to enable the child to reconcile the past 
with the present and to know himself and his 
place in the world. 



INDEX. 

Achievements of mankind, 14-59, 174-7; of early infancy, 105. 

Activity: significance of industrial activity to the race, 49-59, 64-90, 
174-9; racial activity as a means of interpreting the child's atti- 
tudes (see Attitudes); racial activity as a means of socializing 
the child, 6-12, 122-6, 148, 158-70, 179; forms of the child's 
activity, 91-6 (see, also, Construction, Dramatization, Enter- 
tainments, Exhibitions, Experimentation, Exploitation, Illustra- 
tion, Instincts, Observation, Play, Work, Workmanship Instinct); 
its relation to environment, 104-13, 174 (see also Environ- 
ment). 

Advance in culture, 9. 

Africa, northern, its transition from barbarism to civilization, 52. 

Age : of fear, 140 ; of combat, 140 ; of the chase, 140 ; of metals, 
44-8 ; polished stone, 31 ; of drill, 156 (see also Epoch, Stage). 

Agricultural stage : origin of agriculture, 40 ; terrace gardens, 
40 ; why man developed the work begun by woman, 41 ; effect 
of man's superior technological skill, 40, 41 ; educational value, 
41-3 ; beginnings of fortification, 41, 42 ; why the products of 
agricultural activity are prized more highly than products of 
previous activities, 42 ; demands made by agriculture upon 
mind and body, 42, 43 ; character of problems, 42, 43, 80 ; 
significance of agricultural festivals, 43, 80, 81; religion as a 
means of regulating agricultural activities, 43 ; advantages of 
agricultural life, 43; relation of agriculture to slavery, 43, 81, 
82 ; agricultural life contrasted with pastoral life, 42, 43, 82 ; 
agriculture gives stability to political organizations, 44 ; the 
decline of the agricultural festival, 81 ; its materials of value in 
elementary education, 109, 126-30, 165. 

Analysis, its relation to practical activity, 182, 183. 

Animal life : in mid-Pleistocene period, 16; in the late Pleisto- 
cene period, 28, 29, 140; in the post-glacial period, 31 ; at 
beginning of pastoral stage, 35, 36. 
191 



1 92 INDEX 

Animals : change in animals due to man's influence, 28, 35, 36, 
140; extinct forms, 16; living species, 16; domestication of, 
36; as pets, 36; as engineers, 167; in the schoolroom, no, m ; 
migration of, 16, 28, 31. 

Anthropology as a factor in elementary education, 6 (see also 
Activity, Attitudes, House industries, Industry). 

Applications, educational, 97-172. 

Approval, social, as a factor in the upbuilding of society, 26, 27, 
65, 83, 175, 176. 

Architecture : problems presented by primitive architecture, 167; 
law by which it becomes free, 177. 

Area required by people in primitive stages of culture, 36, 43. 

Arrow (see Bow and Arrow). 

Art: relation to industrial activities, 2, 13, 23-7, 34, 35, 37-9, 
43> 73-82, 93, 175 ; origin of, 24 ; of hunting tribes, 26, 27; of 
fishing tribes, 34 ; of pastoral tribes, 37-9, 73-9 ; of agricul- 
tural tribes, 43, 80, 81 ; not differentiated from work and play, 
73-9, 106; tendency to become free, 38, 73, 74, 157; relation 
to the crafts, 23-7 ; form influenced by amount of leisure, 24 ; 
a socializing factor, 157, 158. 

Asia, western, its transition from barbarism to civilization, 52. 

Attention : the savage dislikes the strain of attention, 70, 71 ; of 
savage compared with that of the child, 71, 72 ; its relation to 
the character of the problem, 71, 80,82,83; conditions for 
securing, 82, 83. 

Attitudes, physical : their origin, 60-96 ; remote racial activities 
as a factor in their formation, 61, 70, 97, 98 ; influence of recent 
racial activities, 61,87, 98, 174, 175; physical heredity, 15, 61, 
63,87; social heredity, 15, 61, 87, 88, 98; individual varia- 
tions, 60, 61 ; value of animal psychology in the study of the 
child, 61,62, 97; value of racial activities, 97, 98, 174, 175; 
liability to error in the interpretation of, 62 ^importance of the 
body in the study of instincts, 63 ; due to physiological causes, 
63 ; bound up with most fundamental activities of the race, 64; 
premium placed upon most essential activities, 64 ; transforma- 
tion of, 98, 158; reduction of, 61, 98, 178 ; importance of con- 
tinuity in biological function in explaining, 62, 97 ; how 



INDEX 193 

socialized (see Enrichment of experience); summarized state- 
ments concerning, 174-80 (see also Activity). 

Aurochs in western Europe during the Pleistocene period, 16. 

Boasting, significance of, 27. 

Boats: origin, 150 ; their evolution, 148, 150-52; methods of 
construction, 151, 152; origin of the keel, 150; the raft, 151 ; 
the catamaran, 151 ; the double canoe, 151 ; the outrigger, 
152 ; relation of boats to environment, 152 ; educational value 
of the study of, 148, 150-52. 

Boaz, Franz, statement regarding the brain capacity of the sav- 
age, 18. 

Body: uses of man's body, 19, 20; in relation to principles of 
invention, 20, 21 ; in relation to motive power, 21, 153; in 
relation to tools, 20, 32, 33, 134-40, 149; in relation to mechani- 
cal principles and machines, 21, 153, 154, 170, 171 ; in relation 
to rhythm, 21, 25, 34, 72, 76-8, 119, 120; in relation to the 
fine arts, 21 ; in relation to language, 19; in relation to the 
meter of poetry, 19 ; in relation to emotional attitudes, 63 (see 
also Attitudes); burden placed upon the body in primitive 
stages of development, 19, 22, 65 ; energy of the body supple- 
mented by tools and the application of other forms of motive 
power, 22, 32, 34, 36, 42, 45, 47, 56-8, 84, 93, 64, 133-54, 176. 

Bow and arrow: evolution of, 141-8 ; educational value of the 
problems involved, 141-8. 

Bucher, Carl : quoted regarding handicrafts, 37, 55, 56 ; quoted 
regarding the significance of elements of culture, 59 ; his posi- 
tion regarding the influence of industry upon art an extreme 
one, 78; quoted regarding the house industries, 95, 103. 

Buffon, quoted regarding the domestication of the wild duck, 33. 

Brain of the savage, 18. 

Bryant, George H., statement regarding the use of obsolete tools 
and processes criticised, 95. 

Burges, quoted regarding the use of machinery, 58. 

Captives in war enslaved, 43. 

Cathedrals, 169. 

Catamaran, origin of, 151. 

Cave-bear, 16, 19. 



194 INDEX 

Cave- lion, 16. 

Caves, 1 8. 

Chief, industrial, 23, 34, 45, 46, 82. 

Child : lives an embryonic life, 89 ; character of his motives, 89 ; 
attitudes of the child a means of reconciliation between the 
past and the present, 89, 90 ; needs to participate in funda- 
mental activities, 90 ; has not been studied with sufficient care, 
90, 181 (see, also, Activity, Attitude, Applications, Body). 

Childhood: physical attitudes, 155-9; physical co-ordinations, 
I 55» J 56; differentiation between work and play more marked 
than before, 156, 157 ; function of play, 157 ; dominant inter- 
ests, 158, 159; how attitudes may be utilized, 158-72; atti- 
tude toward work, 157 ; function of art, 161 ; function of 
science, 161 ; use of the house industries, 161, 162 ; individual 
vs. co-operative activity, 162, 163 ; regulation of labor, 162, 
163; significance of the past with reference to the present, 
163 ; significance of public works, 167, 168 ; place of primitive 
engineering, architecture, and mechanics, 153-5, 166-72 ; use 
of the handicrafts, 168, 169; its key to the factory system, 
170-72. 

Churning rhyme, 76. 

Circuit, organic, 82, 86, 91, 108 (see also Completion of a situa- 
tion, demand for). 

City-state: significance of, 51-3: problems it presents to the 
child, 164, 165, 167, 168. 

Civilization: foundation of, 164, 165 (see also Industry); its 
formulated results of little educational value, 88, 180. 

Classification ; cannot represent the whole nature of the child, 
60, 61; of industrial epochs, 14, 15; of stages of mental 
development, 97-172. 

Climate: in mid-Pleistocene period, 16; in late Pleistocene 
period, 28 ; in post-glacial period, 31. 

Clodd, Edward, reference to concerning origin of tools, 134. 

Clothing : need of clothing a motive for the development of 
sciences and arts, 25; child's interest in clothing, 115, 116; 
self-exhibitive extinct, 115; burden placed upon the body in 
maintaining necessary temperature before the use of cloth- 
ing, 22. 



INDEX 195 

Colonization, 166. 

Commerce : growth of, 5l» 168 ; Phoenician, 165 (see also Trade). 

Compass, mariner's, invention of, 99. 

Completion of a situation, demand for, 91-3, 171, 176, 178. 

Comte, August, quoted regarding work as a civic function, 85. 

Conflict interest : in hunting and fishing stages, 22-4, 34, 69 ; 
satisfied by means of war in the pastoral stage, 37-9 ; rein- 
forced by the festival and by warfare in the agricultural stage, 
43,80,81; gradually restricted to narrower fields, 94,95; a 
permanent possession of mankind, 95. 

Construction: its place in elementary education, 91,92, 171; 
how manifest in the period of infancy, 11 3-16 ; the child 
should not be obliged to forego the educational opportunity of 
providing some of the materials for, 108-13, I2 6, 148, 164; 
its relation to destruction, 30 ; origin of attitude underlying 
construction, 67-84; supplies need of the child, 157-61, 178; 
of public works, 167 ; its relation to the sciences and arts, 177 
(see also Art, Industry, Science). 

Consumption : of crops before they are ready for the harvest, 42 ; 
production and consumption not originally separated in time, 
67-70 ; round of activities from production to consumption in 
the handicraft period, 84 ; the process of production and con- 
sumption represent a complete situation, 91. 

Continuity: in biological function, 62, 97; in mental attitude, 
62, 97. 

Conversation : as a means of relieving monotonous work, 72 ; the 
spontaneous conversation of children while engaged in rhyth- 
mical work, 78, 79. 

Cooking, its educational value, 114, 163, 164. 

Co-operation, beginnings of, 23-6, 29 ; by means of rhythm, 
24, 25, 34, 72, 78-80, 94, 1 19-21, 162 ; of workers in the edu- 
cational field, 182-4. 

Co-ordinations: physical, 98, 105, 133, 155, 156; of the hunter 
supplied the basis of the skill he developed in drawing and 
carving, 26 ; relation of co-ordinations used in art to those 
developed by industrial activities, 26, 34, 38, 39, 72, 74-81 ; 
premium placed upon the development of necessary co-ordina- 
tions, 81, 88; the bow and arrow as a means of co-ordinating 
mind and body, 141. 



196 INDEX 

Course of study (see Curriculum). 

Crafts : represent particular divisions of the industrial process, 
84 ; supply skill for the development of art (see Art, Co-ordi- 
nations) ; educational significance of (see Handicraft system). 

Curiosity a necessary trait, 23. 

Curriculum : overloaded, 5 ; additions, by the process of aggre- 
gation, 5 ; materials for, 97-172, 183-7. 

Cushing, Frank Hamilton, quoted regarding the arrow, 143. 

Dance : origin of, 34 ; disapproval of one who made a mistake 
in the dance, 34 ; the professional dancer emerges, 38 ; panto- 
mimic dances preserved in folklore, 75. 

Darwin, Charles, his position regarding animal psychology, 
61,62. 

Dawkins, Boyd, an authority on animal life in the Pleistocene 
period, 16. 

Decoration : origin of, 25 ; significance, 25, 27 ; relation to the 
workmanship instinct, 26^27. 

Demand for literature of prehistoric life, 10, 12. 

Dependence, industrial : in pastoral stage, 39, 40 ; a factor in 
the development of idea of social dependence, 40. 

Development : industrial, 14-59 ; psychical 60-96 ; of the child, 
97-172. 

Devices: of hunter, 25-9, 73, 133-54; of fisher, 32 ; to facili- 
tate trade, 150-52, 167 (see also Inventions). 

Dewey, John, referred to, 106, 156, 187. 

Differentiation of sciences and arts from industrial activity, 2, 
23-7, 34, 38, 73-81, 85-7, 93, 106, 177 (see also Art, Indus- 
try, Science). 

Division of labor : beginnings of, 24, 47, 51 ; minute division, 
55-8 (see also Differentiation, Labor). 

Dog domesticated by early hunting and fishing tribes, 32. 

Domestication of animals, 35-40. 

Dramatization, its place in elementary education, 1 17-19, 124, 
125 (see also Illustration, Play). 

Drawing, origin of, 25. 

Dress : origin of, 25 ; in relation to child's constructive activities, 
115, 116 (see also Clothing). 



INDEX 197 

Economists not the only ones interested in the industrial situa- 
tion, 4. 

Economy: domestic, 16-54; town, 54-6; national, 56-9. 

Education : in ancient times, 3 ; in mediaeval times, 3, 4 ; in 
modern times, 4 ; consequences of neglect to provide for prac- 
tical activities, 4 ; waste in present educational methods, 9, 10, 
180 (see also Activity, Applications, Attitude, Curriculum). 

Electricity as a motive power, 58. 

Emerson, Ralph Waldo, quoted regarding tools, 134. 

Energy (see Surplus energy). 

Engineering, problems in primitive, 166,167. 

Engineers, animals as, 167. 

Enrichment of experience, 109, 122-55, 158. 

Entertainments, school, 93. 

Environment: a factor in the child's problems, 105-13, 125-7, 
149,167; how it takes on a new meaning, 126 ; its relation 
to psychical attitudes (see Attitudes) ; transient vs. perma- 
nent factor in, 99, 100 ; what constitutes the natural and the 
social environment of the child, 100-102 ; man's relation to, 16, 
21, 23, 28, 31, 32, 35, 36, 41, 48, 99, 104, 146 ; of man in mid- 
Pleistocene period, 16 (see also Exploitation, Situation). 

Epochs : industrial, 14-59 ; psychical, 60-96 ; of the hand, 133 ; 
of the tool, 133 ; classification of epochs of development in the 
child, 97-172. 

Eskimo, 32, 147. 

Europe : environment of western in mid-Pleistocene period, 16, 
17; transition from barbarism to civilization, 52; handicraft 
system in, 54-6. 

Evolution : change from organic to human, 17 ; more cumulative 
results gained by the study of the evolution of one race than 
by study of diverse contemporary races, 123, 188; of the boat, 
149-52 ; of the bow and arrow, 14 1-8. 

Exchange, methods of, I. 

Exhibitions (see Entertainments). 

Experiment, 149. 

Experimentation : its place in elementary education, 92 ; how 
manifest in period of infancy, 104-6 ; playful experimenta- 
tion in pastoral stage, 74 (see also Activity, Exploitation). 



198 INDEX 

Exploitation : how manifest in the successive stages of culture, 
57, 64-7 ; its place with reference to other activities of life, 
67 ; of the child, 105, 108-12, 127 ; its relation to the preda- 
tory instinct, 51 ; history of, 64-7. 

Exploration, 166. 

Expression (see Activity). 

Factors : bound up in the industrial process, 2, 12 (see also 
Art, Differentiation, Industry, Science) ; transient vs. perma- 
nent, 99, 100. 

Factory system : arose in response to the use of steam as a motive 
power, 56, 84 ; changes affected by, 57, 84, 85, 94, 96 ; use of 
electricity, 58 ; unwillingness to use machinery, 58 ; proper 
use of, 58 ; educational significance, 85, 86, 96, 169-72, 187. 

Fairs, 51. 

Family, patriarchal, spirit of reverence fostered by, 39. 

Fear a virtue, 22. 

Festival: origin of, 43, 80 ; decline of, 87. 

Feudal system : the transition from barbarism to civilization, 
53, 54 ; industrial organization, 54 (see also House industries). 

Fire : significance of its conquest, 23, 24 ; worship of, 23 ; man's 
condition previous to the use of, 22. 

Fishing stage : earliest fishing people, 31 ; environment, 31 ; 
problems in fowling and fishing, 32 ; implements and weapons, 
32 ; deep-sea fishing, 34 ; contrasted with hunting stage, 34 ; 
regulation of industry, 34 ; progress in industries and arts, 35 ; 
genesis of sea-lore, 35 ; influence of sea and sky upon man's 
character, 35. 

Fish-weirs, 32. 

Folklore reveals much concerning the early life of mankind, 

75, 77- 
Food : of man in Pleistocene period, 22, 24, 28 ; more steady 
supply in the fishing than in the hunting stage, 33, 34 ; semi- 
domesticated animals used as food in times of scarcity, 36 ; 
first regular supply in pastoral stage, 37 ; how protected from 
thoughtless members of clan, 42 ; search for food a stimulus 
for travel, 48 ; a stimulus for exploitation of environment, 64 ; 
as a factor in the child's interest in plants, 112 ; not a strong 



INDEX 199 

factor in child's interest in animals, no; its preparation a 
means of education, 114, 163, 164; significance of the change of 
seasons in relation to the food supply of primitive peoples, 128. 

Forces operating to induce man to make the transition from the 
pastoral to the agricultural life, 35-7 (see also Surplus energy). 

Forethought, developed by pastoral and agricultural life, 37, 42, 

43, 129. 
Fortification (see Protection). 
Fowling, devices used in, 33. 

Games: weaving, 75 ; imitations of serious activities, 24, 25, 74, 
75 ; hunting, 124 ; trading, 131 ; games played for the sake of 
skill, 156 (see Art, Play, Rhythm). 

Government : municipal, 87 : how the child may be led to 
realize the need of, 129. 

Group : individuality fused in that of the group, 25 ; disapproval 
of, 34 ; political groups, 40, 44 ; the relation of the child to 
the group, 109 ; significance of larger social groups in the edu- 
cation of the child, 122, 158, 164, 179 (see also Public Works); 
(see also Approval). 

Gunpowder, invention of, 99. 

Habitations, 129. 

Hafting, 139. 

Hammer, invention of, 135—7. 

Handicraft system : rise of, 54 ; distinguished from the wage 
system, 54 ; characterized by a breaking up of the industrial 
process, 55 ; significant with reference to the market, 55 ; rela- 
tion to travel and transportion, 55 ; its proper sphere today, 56; 
application of wind and water as a motive power during this 
period, 56 ; inauguration of free labor, 56 ; educational signifi- 
cance of, 84, 95, 96, 169 ; problems it presents of value in the 
period of childhood, 168. 

Hands: used in locomotion, 19, 105; epoch of the hand, 133. 

Hanseatic league, 168. 

Harris, W. T., quoted with reference to play, 117. 

Heredity : physical, 15, 61, 63, 87 (see also Activity, Attitudes, 
Body, Co-ordinations); social, 15, 6.1, 87, 88, 98, 180, 184 (see 
also Approval, Curriculum, Self-exhibitive instinct). 



200 INDEX 

History an organic part of present life, 12. 

Home cannot supply industrial training, 5. 

Horn, development of, 79. 

Hornaday, W. T., quoted regarding bisons as makers of roads, 
167. 

Hospitality, 51. 

House industries : significant with reference to the clan or house- 
hold, 55, 84 ; educational significance contrasted with that of 
handicrafts, 84, 96 ; as modes of production, 96 ; value in child- 
hood, 96, 1 6 1-8. 

Hunting stage : earliest records found, 16 ; animal life in western 
Europe in mid-Pleistocene period, 16; climate, 15; plant life, 
16; man of this period, 16, 18, 19; his superiority over the 
animals due to what, 20 ; danger of early specialization, 20 ; 
food, 22 ; fear a virtue, 22 ; little surplus energy at first, 22 ; 
relations to plants and animals, 23; significance of the con- 
quest of fire, 23, 24 ; man seeks conflict, 24 ; beginnings of art, 
24, 25 ; hunting people excel in representative art, 26 ; arts 
that require leisure not developed, 26 ; social instincts, and 
their relation to formation of industrial habits, 26-8 ; man's 
influence upon wild animals, 28 ; intellectual advance of the 
period, 29, 30 ; strenuous life of the time, 29 ; not so centraliz- 
ing in its tendencies as the pastoral life, 39 ; educational 
materials it presents, 123-6, 133-48. 

Hutchinson, H. N., referred to in connection with description of 
man of earliest period, 18. 

Huxley, 18. 

Illustration : its place in elementary education, 92 ; distinguished 
from construction, 92 ; opportunities it presents for the develop- 
ment of technique, 92. 

Implements (see Devices, Inventions, Tools, Weapons). 

Impulse (see Attitudes, Instinct). 

Industries (see Age of metals, Agricultural stage, City-state, Fac- 
tory system, Feudal system, Fishing, Handicraft system, House 
industries, Hunting stage, Pastoral stage, Trade, Transporta- 
tion, Travel). 

Industry: its relations to sciences and arts, 2, 13, 23-7, 34, 35, 



INDEX 201 

37-9, 43) 73, 82, 93, 175; its relation to society, 2, 3, 5, 16- 
59 ; a means of reconciling conflicting factors in the curriculum, 
5, 104-72 ; its relation to psychical attitudes, 60-96. 

Infancy, stage of: psychical attitudes, 104-6; physical co-ordina- 
tions, 105, 116; achievements of early infancy, 105; later infancy 
the play period, 106; music as a means of regulating activity, 
1 1 9-2 1 ; use of rhythm, 11 9-21. 

Instinct (see Approval, Attitudes, Conflict interest, Exploitation 
Self-exhibitive instinct, Workmanship instinct). 

Interest, child's: in animals, no, III; in plants, 112 ; in 
topographical features, 112, 126 ; in natural phenomena, 112; 
in construction, 1 13-16; in food, 11 0-14; in household 
occupations, 114; in shelter, 114; in clothing, 115, 116; in 
technique, 156; in work, 114, 157; in play, 157 (see Play); in 
art, 157, 158; in metals, 131 ; in tools, 134-52, 170; in 
mechanics, i53 - 5, I 7 I » m problems of ancient civilizations, 
164, 165 ; in public works, 167. 

Invention : in hunting stage, 20-9, 64, 65, 1 34-8 ; in fishing 
stage, 32-5, 66, 148-52; in pastoral stage, 36-9, 66, 73-7; 
in agricultural stage, 41-4, 66, 80 ; in age of metals, 45-7, 
66 ; in period of the early development of travel, trade, and 
transportation, 49-51, 66, 148-52; during handicraft period, 
55, 56 ; during period of national economy, 56-8, 84 ; of the 
printing press, gunpowder, and the mariner's compass, 99 ; why 
some inventions are abortive, 99 ; of the child, 82 -93. 

Isolation of the past prevented, n, 12. 

Kitchen middens, 31. 

Knife, invention and uses of, 138-40. 

Knitting rhymes, 75, 77, 78. 

Labor : a personal occupation, 84 ; a civic function, 84 ; a social 
function, 84; free, 71-3, 80-83, 120-21; slave, 43, 82-4; 
how labor became irksome, 66-95, J 76; effect of a minute 
division of labor, 84-7, 176. 

Leisure, due to better means of protection and acquisition of food, 
22, 24, 28, 33, 34, 37 ; relation to the development of different 
forms of art, 26, 37-9, 74 (see Art, Surplus energy). 

Lever, primitive form of, 154. 



202 INDEX 

Limitations : in dealing with a large problem, 13 ; of materials 
used in processes of construction, 30, 70, 143, 146-8, 152, 
167. 

Loeb, Jacques: statement regarding traits due to heredity, 63; his 
method of demonstrating the change in the instincts of lower 
forms of life, 181. 

Machairodus latidens, 16, 28. 

Machine, origin of, 21, 153, 154, 170, 171 (see also Body, 
Machinery, Mechanical principles, Tools). 

Machinery : and the factory system, 1, 4, 81, 84, 107, 168 ; unwill- 
ingness to use, 58 ; proper use of, 58 (see also Factory system). 

Mallery, Garrick, quoted with regard to pantomime, 118. 

Manual training, original impulse came from house industries, 95. 

Manufacture (see Industry, Work, Workmanship instinct). 

Market: local, 55 ; national and international, 55; origin of, 51, 
131. 

Mason, Otis Tufton, quoted and referred to, 20, 134, 146, 147, 
155. 

Materials (see Curriculum, Enrichment of experience, Exploita- 
tion, Limitation). 

Measurement, original units furnished by the body, 21, 143 ; need 
of more precise standards, 49, 131. 

Mechanical principles, 153, 154. 

Memory, associative, 20, 28. 

Metallurgy, 44,45, 130. 

Metals, Age of : first use of, 44 ; probable origin of smelting, 45, 
46 ; experience which man brought to the processes of metal- 
lurgy, 45 ; significance of myths regarding metal workers, 46; 
significance of the use of metals, 47 ; educational opportuni- 
ties presented by the history of this age, 129, 130. 

Methods (see Process, educational). 

Migrations, of animals, 16, 28, 48, 128. 

Mind, increasing demand for use of, 20, 25, 28, 34, 36, 37, 42-6, 
49, 56, 57, 71, 80, 81, 84-7. 

Montesquieu, 51. 

Motive, preparation as a motive in education, 89. 

Motive power: human muscles, 21,93, I0 5, *53 ', animal, 55, 56, 
82 ; wind and water, 56, 83 ; steam, 56-8 ; electricity, 58 ; 



INDEX 20 3 

a problem in transportation, 51 ; mode of application patterned 
after human movements, 21, 153, 154, 170, 171. 

Music: as a means of regulating activity, 43, 82, 83, 1 19-21; 
becomes more free in pastoral stage, 38, 177. 

Musical instruments, subservient to practical activity, 38, 79. 

Myths, genesis of, 35. 

Need : destruction significant as a response to a social need, 30 ; 
utilitarian, 22-6 (see also Food); of artificial stimulus to sus- 
tain activity, 43, 70 (see also Conversation, Dance, Festival, 
Rhythm); social need in relation to invention, 26, 99 ; of child 
(see Attitudes, Enrichment, Interest). 

Observation, its place in elementary education, 92 (see also 

Exploitation). 
Occupation (see Activity, Industry). 
Organization of labor, 174-7 (see also Regulation of industry, 

Rhythm). 
Ornament, significance of, 25. 
Optional work, 168. 
Outrigger, 152. 
Ovens, 130. 

Paleontology, 16. 

Pantomime, 75, 118 (see also Art, Dance, Dramatization). 

Pastoral stage : how transition was made from hunting and fish- 
ing to the pastoral life, 35 ; sympathetic relations established, 
37 ; smaller area needed, 37 ; new problems demand fore- 
thought, 37 ; how emotional reactions are secured, 37, 38 ; art, 
38 ; development of textile industries, 38 ; war, 38 ; humaniz- 
ing element developed, 39 ; industrial dependence a factor in 
social dependence, 39, 40 ; compared with agricultural stage, 
40 ; predatory instinct strengthened, 39 ; educational value of, 
39-44, no, in, 128. 

Pile-dwellings, 41. 

Plant life in Pleistocene period, 17. 

Plants : cannot be depended upon to reproduce themselves, 42 ; 
cultivation of, 40-44; child's interest in, 1 10-12 (see also 
Agricultural stage). 



204 INDEX 

Play : the play period of the race, 73 ; the play period of the 
child, 106; dramatic play, 117,118 ; hunting plays, 124; social- 
izing function of, 157; its relation to work, 122, 157, 158; a 
force that should be utilized in education (see Education, 
Waste in the educational process). 

Pleasure : from the exercise of bodily power, 93 ; from the aug- 
mentation or transformation of muscular power, 93. 

Pleistocene period 16, 18, 28, 31, 35, 67. 

Poetry, its relation to practical activity, 19, 35, 177 (see 
also Rhymes). 

Powell, J. W., quoted with reference to the city-state, 52. 

Principles: of mechanics, 153, 154 ; the weight, 153 ; the elastic 
spring, 154; the inclined plane, 154; the wedge, 154; the 
lever, 154; the sled, 154; the roller, 154; the pulley, 154; the 
wheel and axle, 154 ; twisting, shrinking, and clamping devices, 
154; the screw, 154 ; of construction, 167 ; of invention, 20, 21 ; 
of education, 9, 97-104; of rank, 52. 

Printing, invention of, 99. 

Problem: statement of problems to be considered, 7-13, 173 ; 
child's problems, 11, 105, 106, 159, 160 (see also Activities, 
Attitudes, Stages of development); of socializing child's 
instincts, 122, 126, 160, 161, 166-8 (see also Curriculum, 
Enrichment of experience); of hunting stage, 22-9, 71, 72, 147; 
of fishing stage, 34, 149-52; of pastoral stage, 36-8, 81, 82; of 
agricultural people, 41-3, 80-82 ; of metal workers, 45, 46, 
130; of travel and trade, 49, 51, 149-52, 165-7; unsettled 
problems, 57,60,61, 181. 

Process : educational (see Education) ; place of obsolete indus- 
trial processes, 164, 168, 169, 186, 187 (see also Activity, 
Industry). 

Protection: of crops, 42 ; from animals, 41 ; from enemies, 41, 
42 (see also Fortification, Pile-dwellings, Taboo, War). 

Prowess, 68. 

Public Works, 167, 168, 179. 

Race parallel must not be applied literally, 134 (see also Prin- 
ciples of education). 

Rafts, 151. 

Reactions, emotional: in hunting stage, 24-7, 46, 47, 63-5, 71, 



INDEX 205 

72 ; in fishing, 34, 35 ; in pastoral stage, 38, 73-9, 82 ; in 
agricultural stage, 43, 80 (see also Art, Festivals, Music, 
Rhythm). 

Reflection not adapted to serve the needs of the savage, 22, 71. 

Reflexes, 80 (see also Attitudes, Body, Co-ordinations, Instincts). 

Regulation of industry by rhythm and the dance (see Dance, 
Rhythm) ; by the festival (see Festival) ; by religion (see Reli- 
gion) ; by overseers (see Slavery) ; by captains of industry 
(see Factory system). 

Relations : destructive, 23, 24, 30-34, 39 (see also Exploitation, 
War); constructive, 30 (see also Industry, Workmanship instinct); 
with fire, 23 ; with animals, 23, 24, 32, 34, 37 ; with plants, 23, 
41 (see also Agricultural stage); with natural forces (see Motive 
power) ; sympathetic, 23, 37, 50, 51 ; ethical, 84-6, 89, 90, 93-5; 
of worker to the work (see Work) ; of child to technique rep- 
resented by the tool, 105, 107, 108, 115-6, 133, 156, 171, 186; 
fundamental relations laid bare in primitive societies and 
obscured in complex ones, I. 

Religion as a means of regulating industry, 43, 83. 

Revolution, industrial, 170, 180. 

Rhymes, 76-9. 

Rhythm : the body a factor in, 76 (see also Body) ; a means of 
securing co-operative action, 25, 34, 72, 76, 162, 163 (see also 
Art, Music). 

Richards, Arthur W., 187. 

Roads, origin of, 167. 

Rousseau, 100. 

Ruskin, 58. 

Savage : brain of the, 18 (see also Mind); attitude toward work, 
70. 

Science : its relation to industry, 56 (see also Differentiation, 
Industry); attitude of the child toward, 105-12 (see also 
Exploitation) ; its relation to construction, 167, 168 ; contribu- 
tions of to child study, 181, 182 ; development of in modern 
times, 85. 

Sea and sky as factors in education, 35. 

Self-exhibitive instinct, 25-30, 72, 115, 116 (see also Approval, 
Art, Dress, Ornament). 



206 INDEX 

Sequences, of racial activities, 124, 134-55, J 77 (see also Evolu- 
tion). 

Serfs, 83. 

Shaler, N. S., 59. 

Shelter, 19, 114, 129. 

Shepherds (see Pastoral stage). 

Singer, professional, 38. 

Situation: in mid-Pleistocene period, 16, 17; in late Pleistocene 
period, 28; of early fishing tribes, 31 ; during transition from 
hunting and fishing to pastoral and agricultural life, 35, 36. 

Skeletons found in caves of France, 18. 

Skill : in textiles, 38, 76 ; in crafts transferred to art, 26, 73-9. 

Slavery: its relation to agriculture, 43, 81, 82; its conditions 
should not be perpetuated in the schools, 103, 121, 163 (see 
also Regulation of industry). 

Smelting, 45, 46, 130. 

Smith, Worthington P., 1 8. 

Society (see Approval). 

Sociology, a factor in elementary education, 6. 

Song, 72, 75, 177. 

Specialization, premature : in animals, 19, 20 ; in the child, 88, 
108, 109. 

Spinning, 38, 75, 144. 

Stages of development : racial (see Agricultural stage, City-state, 
Factory system, Feudal system, Fishing stage, Handicraft 
system, Hunting stage, Metals, Pastoral stage, Trade, Trans- 
portation Travel); individual (see Childhood, Infancy, Transi- 
tion from infancy to childhood). 

Standards (see Approval, Measurement). 

Stimulus (see Activity, Attitudes, Curriculum, Problem). 

Story-teller emerges from the mass, 38. 

Strains, intellectual, moral, and physical, 71, 133 (see also 
Attention). 

Surplus energy : little surplus before the conquest of fire, 22, 24, 
28 ; greater surplus in later stages, 33, 34, 36-8, 42 ; seeks 
expression in art and play, 74 (see also Art, Food, Play). 

Swimming, 149. 



INDEX 207 

Taboo, 83. 

Technique: stage. of undeveloped, 64, 65, 103; its relation to 
other factors in the educational process, 133, 134, 156, 171, 186 
(see also Strains, Tools). 

Teeth, burden placed upon, 22. 

Text-books, need of a change in the character of, 183-8. 

Textiles, 38, 75. 

Thomas, W. I., 32, 95. 

Tools : a means of reinforcing man's body, 22, 32, 34, 36, 48, 
82-6, 92, 134 (see Body); adapted to later infancy, 115; 
adapted to transitional period, 133-52 ; period of the tool, 
133; relation to machines, 153, 154, 170-78. 

Topography, 112-26. 

Town economy, 54-6. 

Toys, childrens', 107, 108. 

Trade : origin of, 48 ; promoted by religious festivals, 49 ; mar- 
kets established, 49 ; privileges granted to traders, 49 ; stand- 
ards of measurement established, 49 ; first articles of trade, 50 ; 
development of technique of, 50, 51 ; effects of, 51 ; its use in 
education, 130-32, 149-52. 

Tradition, 46. 

Trails, the earliest routes of travel, 48, 167. 

Transition from infancy to childhood : psychical attitudes, 12 1, 
122; physical co-ordinations, 133; materials for enriching 
experience in, 122-55; use °f primitive industries, 122, 123; 
sequences presented, 124-52; mistake of using stories merely 
to gratify the child's instincts, 126 ; relation of stories to play, 
126, 127 ; how topography may become of interest at this time, 
129 ; transition from interest in play to interest in serious 
activity, 129-55 > significance of this period with reference to 
the tool, 133; relation of tools to the body, 133-52; educa- 
tional value of child's inventions, 133-55 ; the hammer, 135-7; 
the knife and spear, 138-40; bow and arrow, 141-8; boats, 
148-52; mechanical principles, 153, 154. 

Transportation: primitive, 48-51, 148-52; application of steam 
to means of, 56; break in, 49, 127. 

Traps, a factor in the domestication of animals, 36. 



208 INDEX 

Travel: original stimulus, 48; trails the earliest routes, 48, 167; 
purposes of, 48 ; influence upon handicraft system, 54, 55 ; 
application of steam to means of, 56 ; a subject of educational 
value for the child, 132 (see also Boats, Roads, Trade, Trans- 
portation). 

Trophy, significance of, 27. 

Tropisms, 63. 

Urus, 16, 19. 

Veblin, Thorstein, 68, 69. 

Wage-work, 54. 

War : upon animals, 24-35 \ upon man, 38, 41, 81, 82 ; its social 
service, 39, 43, 44; beginnings of fortification, 41; relation to 
development of musical instruments, 79. 

Waste in the educational process, 9, 10, 180. 

Weapons (see Devices, Inventions). 

Weaving, 75 (see also Textiles). 

Wilson, Thomas, 141. 

Woman's share in the division of labor, 24, 41. 

Work : attitude of savage toward, 70 ; attitude of the child 
toward, 71, 72, 144, 157 (see also Activity, Attitude); inade- 
quate provision made for training people for their work, 4, 86 ; 
optional work in the schools, 168 ; and play, 73, 157. 

Workers : affected by their work, 86 ; by minute division of 
labor, 57, 84 ; by handicrafts, 84. 

Workmanship instinct : origin of, 67-72 ; looseness in the use of 
the term, 67 ; how affected by successive stages of culture, 
69-87 ; its relation to art and play, 73-80 (see also Art, Indus- 
try, Play). 



APR 16 1903 



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